Reassembled
by Elspeth1
Summary: The long-delayed conclusion to Resurrection-verse. Registration is long gone, several people are back from the dead, and Steve and Tony have put their lives and their team back together. Mostly. One long-time Avenger is still missing. Now she's back, and Chthon has come with her.
1. Chapter 1

**Title:** Reassembled

**Rated:** PG-13  
**Pairings:** Steve/Tony, Hank/Jan, some minor background het and slash  
**Warnings:** Minor violence, references to past/off-screen mind-control-induced sex.

**Disclaimer:** The characters and situations depicted herein belong to Stan Lee and Marvel comics. No profit is being made off of this fan-written work.

**Summary:** The long-delayed conclusion to Resurrection-verse. Registration is long gone, several people are back from the dead, and Steve and Tony have put their lives and their team back together. Mostly. One long-time Avenger is still missing. Now she's back, and Chthon has come with her.

**Authors' note:** This fic was originally written and posted to livejournal in 2010-2012 (yes, it took two years to write it and then two more years for me to belatedly upload it here *facepalm*). It is the final installment in a series of fics that go AU from the end of Civil War, and disregard most canon that took place after that point, including Secret Invasion. (And Siege, and Dark Reign, and AvX, and anything else published after 2010). Nobody is a Skrull in this verse – Hank Pym, Jessica Drew, et al were all the original article throughout New Avengers and Civil War. Steve was brought back from the dead via magic and began a relationship with Tony (and never spent any time in any parallel universes), Bucky never put on the Captain America costume, Tony never deleted his brain or got the Bleeding Edge armor, the shadowy conspiracy behind the SHRA was entirely human in origin (again, no Skrull), and Fury is back in charge of SHIELD. There's only one Avengers team, and both halves of the OTP are on it.

* * *

**Reassembled**

**Chapter 1**

Wanda Maximoff came back to herself 39,000 feet above the Atlantic Ocean. The yellow and grey padded seat-back in front of her had "Lufthansa" embroidered on it, and the plastic LCD screen set into the back of the chair in front of her was displaying a map of the North Atlantic with a dotted line indicating the plane's flight path – from Berlin to New York.

She couldn't remember how she had gotten from Mount Wungadore to Berlin, couldn't remember boarding the plane. The last thing she remembered clearly was stepping inside the cottage she had been sharing with what she _knew_, now, was not her Aunt Agatha, and locking herself in.

No art on the walls, no plants, no books. No telephone. No way of contacting the outside world.

She hadn't lived there, despite the false memories of sharing the cottage with her "aunt" that had been poured into her head. She'd been a prisoner there, not only in the house, but in her own body, her own mind.

Everything after that moment when she had realized how _wrong_ things were was a blank, as if something had dragged a hand over her memory and wiped an entire section out. Or perhaps she hadn't been there to remember it at all – the thing-that-was-not-her-aunt might have just switched her off like a doll, and put her away until she was needed again.

There was a half-empty plastic glass of orange juice sitting in the corner of the fold-down tray in front of her, and the taste of oranges in her mouth. She didn't remember drinking it.

The little screen in front of her had a box in the corner displaying the time and date for the plane's projected arrival in New York City. She blinked, rubbing at her eyes with one hand, and then looked at it again.

It had to be wrong. The last thing she remembered clearly was – _the world around her warping, shifting, and Xavier refusing to kill her, refusing to stop her, and the thing-that-was-not-Agatha whispering in the back of her head, and when Pietro met her eyes and suggested that she use her powers to give their father what he wanted, she knew that he could hear it, too_ – standing in the United Nations building with Tony. Tony had been crying, wrenching sobs that shook his entire body, and she could tell, from his flushed face and the way his eyes hadn't quite tracked her movements, that he had been drinking. She remembered feeling indignant, angry, impatient – none of the worry or fear she should have felt for someone she had considered a friend for most of her adult life.

That had been over a year ago.

Everything between then and now was one long blur, only a handful of moments standing out with sharp clarity.

She remembered Carol pleading with her to stop – something, stop what? – and Stephen Strange raising a hand and commanding her to sleep. She remembered Mount Wungadore, walking through the village at the foot of the mountain like a ghost, people smiling and waving at her despite the fact that she had never spoken to any of them, never met any of them. _It_ had altered their memories, too.

She remembered Beast coming to see her, telling her that something had happened to the world's mutants, something bad, and asking – begging – for her help in order to fix it. She had sent him away. It had made her send him away.

Whatever it was, Beast had thought that Wanda had done it, and therefore, that it was within her power to undo it.

It had used her to do something. Something awful – she didn't have to remember in order to know that, not when she could feel the clinging remnants of its evil still lurking in the corners of her mind. It was older than humanity, the weight of eons of malice and hate for everything living like a crushing weight sitting in the center of her chest. Anything she had done in service to its will would be abhorrent.

A flight attendant was pushing a cart down the aisle toward her, collecting all the passengers' trash. When she reached Wanda, the woman gave her a bright, false smile. "Thank you," Wanda said, passing her the mostly-empty plastic cup, and the woman blinked.

"You speak English?" she asked, her own English crisp and British-flavored and free of any hint of German accent. "Why didn't you speak it before? I told you I didn't speak Rumanian."

"Transian," Wanda corrected automatically. "It's a dialect of Rumanian." Technically speaking, anyway. The dialect spoken around Mount Wungadore bore about as much similarity to standard Rumanian as Portuguese did to Spanish. "I'm very out of practice with English," she continued, offering the flight attendant an apologetic smile. "I haven't spoken it in months."

The flight attendant's eyebrows went up, probably in skepticism at the sound of Wanda's fluent, American-accented English, but she didn't say anything – just smiled back and moved on.

The words had felt odd in her mouth, awkward after months spent thinking in Rumanian and Transian, when she'd been thinking at all. She had spoken English to Beast, and to Clint, but other than that... The "English lessons" she remembered taking with Agatha hadn't happened, anymore than any of her other memories of talking to Agatha had.

She had been studying magic with Agatha before _It_ had taken control of her. Had it simply pulled the memories of those lessons from her mind and used them to create the false memories of studying English, of cooking together, talking together, all the little day-to-day interactions that living with another person was made up of?

No wonder she had been so hungry for human contact when Clint had come looking for her – all her supposed interaction with other people for months before that had been a lie. She had been alone in that house for half a year when he had come. Longer, maybe.

No wonder his presence had felt so sharp, so bright. He'd been real, the only real thing she had seen or touched in ages.

She'd fallen asleep in his arms, after reminding him to be quiet because 'Aunt Agatha' was sleeping in the next room.

It had watched her have sex. With Clint.

And then Clint had left again, had taken the smiling lies she had fed him, that the thing-that-was-not-Agatha had told her to think, to say, at face value. Had left her alone again.

Outside the airplane's thick window, the tops of fluffy white clouds glowed in the sun, almost blindingly bright. Only when she touched the window and felt the chill seeping in through the glass did it become obvious how cold it was outside. Those smooth, white mounds of cloud might as well have been snow.

It made no sense. Clint had been her friend for over a decade. He thought of the Avengers as his family. Even if he had believed that she had amnesia, he wouldn't have simply left her there. He wouldn't have slept with an amnesiac woman who didn't recognize him, either. She knew Clint, and that wasn't the kind of man he was – Clint rarely had casual sex, for all that he liked to act like a ladies' man occasionally. Well, except for that one time with Jan, and that had been an unqualified disaster all around.

It shouldn't have been funny, had actually been excruciatingly embarrassing to witness at the time, especially the raw, open pain on Hank's face when he had walked in on the two of them, but the memory of Steve's appalled and exasperated expression when he'd chewed Clint out...

Steve.

Clint had said – he had told her that someone he loved had died, a friend. It hadn't meant anything to her at the time. She had even mused on the irony of it, later, during those brief moments of freedom and lucidity; he'd come to Mount Wundagore because of someone else's death, and had brought something inside of Wanda back to life, without ever realizing what he had done.

She hadn't thought about who her American tourist might actually have been, hadn't wondered about the life he'd had before appearing practically on her doorstep. Hadn't thought about his dead friend one way or the other.

She had kissed him the first time to make him stop crying – silent, embarrassed tears he had been trying to hide behind his hands, his shoulders shaking. "He was like the big brother I never had," he'd said, "and I never got to tell him that, you know?"

She had had some vague thought of comforting him, and then... things were hazy after that, but she remembered feeling satisfied afterwards that she had, indeed, managed to distract Clint, to make him smile.

He'd been talking about Steve. He had told her that Steve was dead, and it hadn't even registered, had meant nothing to her.

What kind of friend was she, to take advantage of Clint's grief in order to seduce him, and hear about Steve's death and feel nothing? What had the thing that had taken her over turned her into?

Steve was dead. Had been killed while she waited obliviously in Transia for orders from the thing that controlled her. If she had been there...

Steve had taught her how to fight, had been the first person other than Pietro to care about her opinion enough to ask her what _she_ thought about the villains they were fighting, and ask for her suggestions on strategy. She and Pietro had had nowhere to go, after running from Magneto, and Steve had given them a home.

A home she had destroyed.

First her mother, then Django Maximoff, her real father, then her children, and now Steve. All her power, and yet Wanda was never able to save her family when it mattered. She had ended up hurting them more than she'd helped, failing them the same way she had failed to save Vision when he had been taken and disassembled.

_Vision's body had split apart with a scream of tearing metal, pieces of it reforming even as they broke away, reality bending at the edges and remaking him, warping him – _

Wanda froze, staring blankly at the miniature screen in front of her. The little box in the corner still cheerfully counted down the kilometers remaining until they reached the runway at La Guardia.

She had killed Vision. Her magic had infected his body with the Ultron Protocols and literally torn him apart.

She had— It had used her to— _She-Hulk had smashed the Ultrons into so much crumpled metal, impossibly delicate computer circuits shattering under her fists. Gone. Dead. Completely destroyed. So much power, the power to alter the world, and she hadn't done anything to change that. Why hadn't she tried to change it? Why hadn't – _

Wanda reached inside herself for the chaos magic that always waited there... and found nothing.

Even the attempt hurt, as if she were straining herself beyond her limits.

Hurt. It ought to hurt. Had Vision felt pain when he'd been... when the Ultron Protocols had...

The bathroom at the back of the cabin was blessedly empty. Wanda's hands were shaking hard enough that it took her two tries to lock the door.

As soon as the latch clicked home, she bent over the sink and threw up.

* * *

"Scientific progress must not be hindered by the petty constraints of 'law' or 'morality!'"

Steve didn't dignify that statement with an answer. Six seconds from now, according to the countdown Tony was broadcasting over the Avengers' communicators, the electronic billboard directly overhead would stop broadcasting its current giant Target ad and begin displaying a series of propaganda ads produced by A.I.M., filled with subliminal signals designed to drive every human who saw them insane.

Trusting Jan and Clint to deal with the A.I.M. hirelings he could just catch sight of sneaking up behind him, he turned and threw his shield at the billboard. It hit the giant LCD screen with a shower of sparks, and the red and white animated swirls that had been about to form themselves into the Target logo disappeared as the screen flickered, then went dark.

"Jan-" he began.

"Already on it," she said. She fired one last blast directly into the faceplate of an A.I.M. hirelings' yellow radiation-proof suit, then swooped up toward the billboard, flying toward the black plastic box just visible on its lower edge. According to Tony, the box was some kind of hacking device, programmed to hijack the screen and substitute A.I.M.'s images for its regularly scheduled advertisements. Hopefully, it would also serve to convince the city and whichever company owned this particular Times Square billboard not to sue Steve to within an inch of his life for destroying it.

Steve lifted his shield to block a punch from one of the few A.I.M. hirelings still on his feet, then slammed the front of his shield against the man's face – it split the front of his faceplate with a satisfying crack, and he went down in a crumpled heap of yellow plastic.

A.I.M. had been responsible for the fear toxin that had put both Tony and Jan in the hospital last month.

Steve shoved the memory of Tony huddled in a hospital bed, his eyes fixed on things only he could see, out of his mind, and resisted the impulse to give the downed man a good, hard kick in the ribs.

"Did he really just make air quotes when he said 'law' and 'morality?'" Clint asked. He ducked a roundhouse swing from one of the A.I.M. hirelings and slammed his elbow into the man's ribs, doubling him over. Then he turned back to their main antagonist, an arrow nocked and ready to shoot.

Sean "Head Case" Madigan was no longer capable of facial expressions; his face, inside the plexiglass containment helmet that surrounded his dead body with the chemical mists that kept it animated and functioning, was a nightmare vision of exposed muscle and half-rotted skin. Somehow, he managed to sneer at them anyway.

"You think you've won just because you've stopped us here? This was just part of our plan. We've hidden a series of timed explosives all over the city." Madigan grinned, a particularly gruesome expression that reminded Steve far too much of the Red Skull. "Good luck finding them."

"What, those?" Steve grinned back, knowing the expression didn't look particularly friendly. "Iron Man tracked them all down ages ago. You shouldn't have routed the countdown signal through a satellite."

"We were just the distraction," Clint put in, his voice laden with vindictive satisfaction. "The rest of our team's spent the last half hour disarming them all."

Steve's communicator came to life with a faint hiss of static. _"Ms. Marvel just got the last one,_" Sam said. _"You can stop playing with them now."_

"You have no bombs remaining, the three of us have you and your friend there," Steve nodded at the only A.I.M. flunky still on his feet, a short, stocky man who had edged backwards so that Madigan was between him and the Avengers, "outnumbered, and the Wasp is removing your equipment from the billboard right now. If you're smart, you'll surrender."

"Fine," Madigan snapped. "But don't think you've won. A.I.M. will break me out of jail in a week."

Clint braced his feet and drew his arm back until the purple fletching on his arrow was level with his ear. He probably wasn't going to fire – Hank had warned them not to breach Madigan's containment suit, saying that he had no idea what the vapors inside would do to a living human body – but Madigan didn't know that. "The guys at Rykers hate terrorists almost as much as they hate pedophiles, so have a fun week."

"Threats don't frighten me; I'm already dead. And I will not allow my father's dream to die!"

Jan landed on Steve's right shoulder with a thud, the weight of the electronics equipment in her arm making her uncharacteristically clumsy. "You tried to have your father killed by turning him into a living bomb," she said.

Madigan shrugged. "That was part of his dream," he said, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. When your father was M.O.D.O.K., maybe it was.

For all his bluster, Madigan went relatively quietly once the police arrived. He might be M.O.D.O.K.'s son, but he hadn't inherited his father's flair for up-close-and-personal mayhem. Madigan preferred to do his killing at a distance, preferably with high-tech explosives.

Tony, Sam, Carol, and Thor arrived while the police were cuffing Madigan and shoving him into the back of an armored police wagon, each with an armful of wires and bits and pieces of plastic and metal that had once been A.I.M.'s twenty-five electronically-triggered bombs.

Tony's armor was still as brightly polished as it had been that morning, completely free of scratches or scuff. He landed beside Steve with a hiss of jetboots and the harsh, metallic scrape of metal on asphalt, and something inside Steve relaxed.

"I really hate A.I.M.," Tony observed conversationally. "The bombs had vials of some kind of chemical in them. I saved a sample for Hank to analyze."

Steve grimaced. "Nice surprise for the emergency personnel when they arrived on the scene. They shouldn't have to worry about that kind of thing." It was difficult enough being a firefighter or police officer in New York City without terrorist organizations trying to poison you, and men and woman who risked their lives to serve the public good deserved better.

"We did well this day." Thor's deep, rumbling voice echoed in Steve's ear, and only long familiarity kept him from jumping slightly. "You were a most admirable distraction, my friend." He clapped Steve on the shoulder with one massive hand, the force of it enough to make him sway forward a little.

Steve turned, grinning up at his teammate. He knew that it was never a good idea for a man to let himself get too cocky or complacent, but he allowed himself a moment to luxuriate in the joy of having his team around him again. Thor's cloak was flapping slightly in the fall breeze, his armor gleaming in the sunlight even more brightly than Tony's did. Several yards away, Clint and Carol were giving statements to police officers, Clint's purple leathers a garish splotch of color that nearly rivaled the billboards and neon signs around them, and if Steve looked up, he knew he'd be able to see Redwing circling overhead, keeping an eye on the situation from above for Sam. If it weren't for the absence of Wanda and Vision, Steve could almost imagine that the disasters of the past few years hadn't happened.

"I wasn't sure the four of you would be able to get all the bombs defused in time," he admitted. "I should have known better than to worry."

"It would have gone ill for the Falcon had we not. He has much skill and valor, but those do not protect against explosions as Ms. Marvel's invulnerability or an Asgardian's strength may."

He didn't mention Tony's armor. Thor had spent most of the past couple of weeks not mentioning Tony, or Hank. It was hard to blame him, as much as part of Steve wanted to come to Tony's defense, but it made for uncomfortable strategy sessions, since he wouldn't speak directly to the two of them, either.

There were moments when it did feel like the Avengers were whole again, the entire messy disaster of Registration over with, but the aftereffects still lingered. The police had seemed relieved to be able to hand the A.I.M. situation over to the Steve and the others, but some of the bystanders who had gathered to gawk at the fight with A.I.M. had just as much fear and suspicion in their eyes when they looked at the Avengers as they did when watching Madigan rant. Nearly a year since Stamford, two months since the SHRA had been repealed, and some people were still suspicious of anyone in a costume.

And while the Avengers might present a united front to supervillains and to the media, under the surface, the damage done during the fight over Registration still lingered.

"We wouldn't have been able to get to them all in time without Thor," Tony said. He turned to Thor, the expressionless faceplate of his helmet hiding whatever emotion lay beneath it, and added, "It was a good thing we had you with us today. Blowing up is not my favorite thing to do."

Thor's fingers tightened around the grip of his hammer, and he turned away to say something to Jan.

Tony's shoulders slumped a little, the motion visible even in the armor.

"At least you didn't get yourself electrocuted this time," Steve offered, resisting the impulse to lay a hand on one dejected metal shoulder. There were news vans from three different television stations parked only a few dozen feet away.

"Thor wouldn't do that," Tony objected.

Steve shook his head slightly. "I meant by the criminal." It wasn't actually a matter for jokes - watching blue-white lightning crawl over the outside of Tony's armor had been far too reminiscent of the stunt Tony had pulled when his armor had been hacked, and Steve had already been anticipating giving him CPR again, steeling himself for the feel of Tony's ribs bending and cracking under his hands, when Tony had groaned and sat up again. The shock his heart had gotten had probably been bad enough as it was, even if it hadn't succeeded in actually stopping his heart this time.

"That wasn't my fault. We didn't know Live Wire had developed _actual_ lightning powers."

"You knew by the second time he zapped you."

Tony shrugged. "I knew the armor could handle it, and I needed to give the Falcon a chance to get into position behind him."

It would, Steve reflected, be reassuring if Tony occasionally demonstrated a little more concern over his own health. The Extremis allowed him to shrug off injuries more quickly these days, but not _that _quickly.

Sam stepped away from the huddle of law enforcement officials and waved at Steve, coming a few steps closer to them so that they could talk without shouting. "The police want to talk to the two of you." He nodded up at where Steve's shield was lodged in the crackling remains of the billboard. "About that."

"I needed to shut it down quickly," Steve said, suppressing a flash of guilt as he stared up at the damage his shield had done. Someone was going to have to replace that, and he didn't even want to imagine what it was going to cost.

Sam grinned. "Well, that's one way to do it. I always hated those things. I swear they put up more of them every year."

Tony glanced up at the billboard, then turned back to Steve. "Want me to go get it for you?"

Footage of his shield in the middle of the expensive property damage the Avengers had caused was probably going to be on every news program in the city tonight, not to mention the front page of the _Daily Bugle_. "Please," Steve said.

When Tony handed it to him a few minutes later, he couldn't help running one hand over its polished metal surface, checking for the scratches he knew perfectly well wouldn't be there. Nothing could scratch or dent vibranium, except maybe for Thor's hammer, but old habits died hard. You looked after your equipment.

"This morning," Tony began, "before A.I.M. sent us the ultimatum, I was going to ask..." he trailed off, then began again, "They finished construction on the bottom floor of the mansion yesterday. The decorators haven't been there yet, and there's still construction work going on in the east wing and on the roof, but it's livable again. If you don't mind a little hammering in the background, I mean."

Suddenly, A.I.M., the crowd of reporters filling Times Square, the Fox news helicopter overhead, and the police officers who wanted Steve to come down to the station and discuss A.I.M.'s explosives with their bomb squad seemed like minor annoyances.

"I'm already packed," he said. "When do you want to move in?"

* * *

The plane's wheels hit the runway with a jolt, and the malevolent force Wanda had sensed lurking in the corners of her mind rushed in like water filling a bowl.

_"At last,"_ the parody of Agatha's voice sighed inside her head. _"We are close; I can feel it. Soon I shall be free. Soon _we _will be free."_

This time, Wanda could hear the flaws in its façade, the open malevolence that Agatha Harkness had never possessed, and wondered how it had ever fooled her.

Something about it felt familiar, however, and not simply because it was mimicking Agatha's voice. As if she had known it her whole life, as if—

Chthon.

Wanda had thought there was nothing left inside of her to throw up, but now she found herself forcing down a fresh surge of nausea. Of course it was Chthon. Who else would have brought her to Mount Wundagore? What else would be capable of warping and controlling her powers so completely?

He hadn't been able to influence her as strongly during the flight because the plane had been too far from the earth, where he was bound. Now that they had landed again, and she was back on solid ground...

Her mind was still her own, but for how long?

She had to act now, find a way to stop him, to break free. Now, before he erased her again.

The plane came to a stop just as she completed the thought, and a blandly pleasant female voice crackled over the intercom, telling passengers that the plane had completed taxiing, and they were now permitted to unfasten their seat belts and proceed to the exits.

Without any input from her, Wanda's hands began unfastening her seatbelt, and she found herself collecting her coat and a carry-on bag she didn't remember packing, and standing.

The blonde flight attendant from earlier was standing by the closest cabin door, bidding passengers farewell with a practiced smile. "Are you all right?" she asked Wanda, halting her just feet away from the exit. Somehow, her eyes managed to convey a frown despite the unfaltering curve of her lips.

_'No,'_ Wanda wanted to say. _'No, I'm not. Help me, please.'_

"Fine. I get airsick sometimes, especially on long flights. But thank you for your concern."

Then she turned and left the plane, her feet moving steadily down the ramp despite her desperate efforts to stop, to turn around, to exert any kind of control over her own body. She couldn't even twitch her fingers.

Chthon moved her through customs like a puppet, speaking through her mouth and posing her limbs as if she were a living doll. Hearing her own voice emerge from her lips, calm and polite and completely independent of herself, was utterly terrifying. She was helpless, the way she'd been when she had watched her children die, when she had watched Ultron tear Vision apart at Chthon's bidding. And yet she smiled, and told the customs officer how excited she was to be in New York, perfect sincerity in every word.

Nothing to declare, of course, because she hadn't brought any luggage beyond the carry-on bag. Mindless tools didn't need extra changes of clothing. Was she here for business or pleasure? Oh, pleasure, definitely. Just a brief sight-seeing trip. She had been looking forward to it for a very long time. Did he think she should visit the Empire State Building first, or the Metropolitan Museum of Art? She had never been to the British Museum, and she had heard that the Metropolitan's Egyptian collection was surpassed only by the British Museum and the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.

He stamped her passport and waved her through, and once again, her pleas for help remained silent, audible only inside her own head.

Chthon took her to a taxi, then onto the subway – the 4/5 line, traveling downtown. When the train passed through the two stops closest to the Avengers Mansion, Wanda was frozen in her seat; she couldn't so much as turn her head unless Chthon wanted her to.

The Mansion might not even still be there. Her memories after Chthon had begun to control her were vague, but the image of the Mansion burning was sharp and clear. Chthon had used Jack of Hearts' body to destroy it, killing Scott Lang in the process.

Scott's little girl would be what, now? Fourteen? Wanda could remember when Cassie had been seven, a tiny blonde girl in an over-sized Avengers t-shirt who had thought having a superhero for a father was the coolest thing in the world. She had collected insects in jars and kept them by her bed.

She got off the subway in midtown, emerging onto the street to see a familiar cathedral spire visible a few blocks away. The giant cross that topped St. Margaret's stood out starkly against the pale violet of the evening sky.

What did Chthon want in Hell's Kitchen?

_"At last,"_ he sighed, not bothering to mimic Agatha's voice this time. _"Such power. I will be bound no longer."_

Wanda could feel it as well, a faint but distinct aura of chaos magic that emanated from the church. Whatever it was, Chthon planned to use it to break free from his prison, probably killing her in the process. Once he was free, there would be no way to stop him. Chthon was an elder god, one of the primal forces of the universe; no one on earth had the power to defeat him in open battle.

_'No,'_ she thought, throwing all the force of her will at the thought of not moving, of stopping, of turning around – of doing anything other than what she did, which was to walk right up to where St. Margaret's massive wooden doors stood open and enter the cathedral. She didn't even stumble on the threshold, despite the evil she carried inside her.

It didn't seem right that an evil as great as Chthon could walk into a church so easily; there ought to have been a barrier across the threshold, to keep the likes of her out of here.

Inside, the chaos magic that had been only faintly detectable from the street was a swirling miasma, almost visible. It seemed to envelope her as she walked closer to the high altar, seeping into every pore of her body. Unlike Chthon's power, it felt clean, pure.

If he touched it, he would twist it to his will the same way he had used and twisted her.

Another step, and she was at the altar rail. She grabbed for it, desperate to stop herself, and felt a jolt of surprise and stomach-twisting relief when her fingers closed around the polished metal. She tightened her grip until it hurt, her knuckles turning white.

She had moved her hand. Because she chose to, not because Chthon had made her. His control must be slipping, or maybe the power that filled the cathedral nave was interfering with it. It didn't matter – all that mattered was the tiny sliver of freedom it gave her.

"No," she forced out, her voice sounding rough and strangled. The word hurt her throat. "No. I will not be your tool."

"_What treachery is this?"_ Chthon's voice boomed in her head, making the world flash red and black for a moment. _"You have been my tool since the hour of your birth. It is for this that I made you. Do not fight your destiny. Step forward and claim the spear. Set me free, and you will rule the world as my child."_

The people who wanted to use her for their own purposes always sounded the same in the end. "I am Django Maximoff's daughter. Not yours. Not Magneto's."

Her own power was out of reach, still locked away in whatever spell Chthon had tied it up in, but the cathedral was full of chaos magic, magic that didn't belong to Chthon and therefore couldn't be controlled by him. Wanda closed her eyes and grabbed desperately for it, reaching toward the altar with her free hand.

It was like laying her hands on a live electrical wire. Power poured through her like fire, raw and uncontrolled, and only the hard-won control of years kept her from being swept away by it.

Chthon reached for it, his presence like a vast weight in her head.

"No," she hissed again, through gritted teeth, as her knees hit the stone floor. She could feel sweat breaking out along her spine, hear her teeth grinding together.

She lashed out at him with the borrowed magic, feeling a surge of triumph at the pained howl that echoed in her skull, and wrenched her own powers free of the spell that bound them. Reality rippled around her, something that had been warped out of true snapping back into place. The cathedral's massive pipe organ rang like a struck gong, a great chord of sound that echoed discordantly off the stone walls and high, vaulted ceiling.

Her powers flooded back into her, and she staggered to her feet, slamming up magical shields the way Agatha – the real Agatha – had taught her. "Get out of my head," she snarled. "And stay out."

She took a step forward, then grabbed at the altar rail again as the floor lurched under her feet. She could still hear Chthon's whispering, a faint susurrus of sound that seemed to come from everywhere at once. It was too indistinct to make out words, but the volume rose and fell in waves, as if Chthon were alternately shouting and cajoling.

The idea of letting him back inside her made her feel ill.

Wanda straightened, slowly uncurling her fingers from the brass rail and stepped away from it. She could feel cold sweat prickling up and down her sides, sticking her clothing to her skin. She wouldn't be able to hold him out for long – driving him out in the first place had already exhausted her.

She needed help.

She turned on her heel and began to walk toward the doors at a slow, measured pace. It was foolish to fear that Chthon would chase her if she ran – he was an incorporeal demon, not a lion or a wolf or some childhood boogyman. Still, running would call attention to herself, and she had probably already drawn enough of that. Everyone in two block's radius had probably heard the crashing chord from the pipe organ as it was, and drawing the attention of bystanders might give Chthon a chance to use Wanda's powers against them.

The Avengers Mansion was a good thirty blocks away, but if she took the subway – except that Chthon could probably reach her more easily underground, and if he did, she would be trapped in a metal tube with a dozen potential victims. And even if the Avengers Mansion were still standing, the rest of the Avengers had no magical abilities, no way to fight him. And no reason to help Wanda, or believe anything she told them.

The last time they had seen her, she had been insane, possessed, and bent on destroying them all. Going back there now would simply be handing Chthon a chance to finish what he had started, and she wasn't going to give him that chance.

If Doctor Strange hadn't been able to stop her...

Strange. She could go to Strange. The Sorcerer Supreme had faced Chthon before, and managed at the very least to fight him to a draw. Strange was the most powerful magician on Earth; if he couldn't help her, then she was beyond help. And even then, he would be able to do something. Cut off her access to her powers, maybe – it was possible to burn the mutant abilities out of someone. Sinister had done it – or even, if necessary, kill her.

Steve, in that position, wouldn't be willing to— Except that Steve was dead. Tony or Hank might be willing to kill her for the greater good, but Clint, Jan, Simon? They would want to save her at all costs, and there were some costs that she wasn't willing to pay.

Chthon would not use her to harm anyone else she loved. Better to lived maimed and shattered, a shadow of her former self, than be a mindless puppet of evil. Better, if it came to it, not to live at all.

Strange's Sanctum Sanctorum was only a twenty minute walk from Hell's Kitchen. Thirty minutes, in heels. She could be at his door before full dark. Good. Chthon might be more powerful after dark.

Once she was out of sight of the cathedral, she started to walk faster.


	2. Chapter 2

**Chapter Two**

After two months, watching the rest of the team fight via CNN and his Avengers communicator still hadn't gotten any easier. It hadn't been this hard when he'd been on the West Coast Avengers – he'd enjoyed having the extra time to devote to experiments, enjoyed playing support staff and scientific consultant for a while. He ought to be enjoying it now.

Surely he wasn't so insecure in his masculinity that watching Jan fight without him bothered him. She could take care of herself; she had for years, with and without Hank around. And it wasn't as if she were on her own – she had the entire team with her.

It wasn't like the old days, when it had been just Hank, Jan, and one or two of the other founding Avengers, and his absence from the field would have left a major hole in their line-up. Not like when his powers had kept fluctuating, before his body had adapted to the Pym particles. He was _choosing_ not to use them. Because not using his powers was better than being miserable and out of control all the time, and being left out of things was better than losing it at the wrong moment.

Still, watching the security cameras as the rest of the team strode triumphantly into the lobby of Stark Tower, he couldn't help thinking that it would have been awfully fun to punch Sean Maddigan in the face a couple of times. Carefully, while making sure not to crack his faceplate and release unknown chemicals into the atmosphere.

"—and then," Clint said, coming off the elevator a few minutes later with a bounce in his step, "he said that being turned into a living bomb was part of his father's dream. I hope he has a really _entertaining_week at Rykers."

"That's not actually all that funny." Steve's voice was only mildly disapproving, making it obvious that his heart wasn't in the objection. "You shouldn't threaten supervillains with hypothetical prison assault."

Clint snorted. "Like anyone will do anything. He's a rotting corpse who lives inside a containment unit."

"Well, yeah, but that's not the point," Steve was saying, just as Tony said,

"You underestimate some of the guys in Rykers' supervillain block."

"Please don't say that, Tony." Hank heard Jan's voice, first, laden with disgust, and then she stepped out of the elevator and into his line of sight. Her costume was smudged with dust and her hair was tangled from the wind, and she looked absolutely gorgeous. And completely fine and uninjured in any way.

"Good job," Hank said, stepping forward. "I saw you on CNN."

Steve groaned, one hand going up to cover his face. "How many times have they run the footage of my shield hitting the billboard?"

"I stopped counting after the third time," Hank told him. "They did have a nice close-up on Maddigan ranting about the beauty of destruction in the name of science before you guys took him down, though." As far as superhero-related publicity went these days, that was firmly on the positive side. A.I.M.'s poison gas attack on Wall Street was recent enough in everyone's memory that they were still being unanimously portrayed as the bad guys, and the perky, unblinking news anchor had chirped that a little property damage incurred in the name of stopping another round of mass toxin-induced hysteria was a small price to pay, especially in a major tourist area.

It was always nice to see that people had their priorities straight.

"We have some samples for you to analyze." Sam stepped off the elevator last, one hand firmly holding Redwing in place on his shoulder, and nodded at Hank.

"Great." Hank grinned, feeling a surge of ridiculous satisfaction at having something actually useful to do, and then the memory of Jan huddled in a hospital bed flashed into his head, and he added, "Nobody was exposed to them, right?"

"No, we're all fine." Jan closed the distance between them and put a hand on his arm, leaning her head on his shoulder. "There were vials of something in the unexploded bombs."

"I heard, but I just wanted to make sure..." A new substance to analyze was one thing, but trying to race against the clock to develop an antidote for something before it killed one of his teammates was not an experience Hank ever wanted to repeat, no matter how eager he was to contribute in some way beyond playing switchboard operator for them all – truly a vital use of his talents when you considered that a) Tony could do the same thing with the Extremis without even using communications equipment, and b) Thor wouldn't talk to him.

"We're all good," Sam assured him. "Iron Man's got half the vials for you, and Thor's bringing the rest."

Hank glanced automatically at Tony, who shrugged. "We didn't want to risk damaging them by passing them through too many sets of hands. The police bomb squad was afraid they were biological."

In which case, leaving them in Thor's custody made sense, given that he was unlikely to be susceptible to any human diseases – very unlikely, as Hank now knew from direct experience. Asgardian DNA was subtly different from human DNA in a number of ways that would probably be fascinatingly significant to a geneticist... And which Hank was never going to even think of mentioning to anyone, because that project was dead and over with and Thor's genetic code was now none of his business.

Tony held a small, glass vial out to Hank, its contents as clear as water. It looked ordinary, non-threatening.

In Hank's experience, that usually meant just as much potential danger as things that glowed bright, radioactive green, flashed red, or made ominous beeping sounds. He took it gingerly, wishing illogically that he were wearing gloves – if the contents were capable of seeping though glass, they were all doomed anyway. "I'll take a look at it. If it's really some kind of virus, I'll send it to Beast; he specializes in that kind of thing."

Tony and Jan followed him to the lab, Clint trailing along behind them, his bow still held loosely in one hand. As Hank started to set up his work station, he unstrung his bow and ran his hands carefully up and down its length, feeling for flaws or weaknesses. Hank pointed to the far side of the lab without looking up. "Take it over there before you break something."

"That only happened once, and it was _years_ ago," Clint complained, but he went, managing not to smack his six feet of unstrung longbow against anything in the process. Hopefully that boded well for Hank's luck today.

With an unthinking ease that Hank tried very hard not to be jealous of, Jan shrank down and flew to perch on the corner of one of the computer screens, where she could watch him from above without getting in the way. Tony was already shucking his armor without needing to be told, pieces of red and gold metal folding themselves up neatly into an open briefcase on one of the workbenches as if acting of their own volition; Tony's Extremis powers were as fascinating as they were mildly creepy.

It would probably be a simple thing to get Extremis to interface with one of the Ant-Man helmets, creating a cybernetic version of the biological antennae Hank had never been able to convince his body to accept. Unfortunate that the failure rate for Extremis was so high.

How useful would one of his old Ant-Man helmets be without the ability to shrink down and interact with ants on their own level, anyway? The frequencies would still work, even if he and the helmet were at full size...

He pulled his attention back to the task at hand, and slid the first of the vials under the lab's fume hood; he'd just gotten it open, his movements made agonizingly slow by the necessity of the vacuum chamber and the heavy gloves he had to work through, and extracted a sample for examination under a microscope, when Thor's deep voice echoed through the room.

"Wasp, I have brought thee the substance with which our opponents sought to poison the city."

Hank jumped at the sound, nearly dropping the micropipette full of toxin that he was currently awkwardly manipulating with his right glove.

"You and Hawkeye fought most admirably," Thor added. "I would not have been able to recover all the vials if you had not bought us the extra time in which to do so."

"Maybe if all of the people trying to disassemble the bombs had been _speaking_ to each other, it would have gone more quickly," Hank pointed out, not bothering to contain his irritation. "Next time, don't just barge in here; you almost made me drop this."

"It would be best if the contents were analyzed swiftly," Thor said, to Jan.

Nice use of the passive voice, Hank thought. You had to give him credit for that. His ability to convey information to Hank or Tony without actually addressing them directly was improving. It was also getting both ridiculous and really, really irritating.

He sighed, and made himself look up to meet Thor's eyes. "I know you're angry at us. I know why. But Cap's not going to kick his boyfriend off the Avengers any time soon, so can you at least talk to _Tony_?" Hank pointed across the room to where Tony was trying to fade back into a bank of computers.

There was an interminable stretch of silence, as Thor glowered at both of them.

"I'm just going to-" Clint started, then stopped awkwardly and muttered, "Yeah, I'm leaving." The sound of the elevator door sliding shut behind him was loud against the faint background hum of equipment.

Thor cleared his throat, then said, deliberately, "I cannot fight beside someone whom I cannot trust at my back. Captain America has my trust and respect, as do the Wasp and Hawkeye. For their sake, I remain an Avenger, and have chosen not to pursue your treachery." The words 'drop this, or I will decide to pursue it after all,' were unspoken. Hank could hear them anyway; everyone in the room could probably hear them.

"Steve is grateful for that," Tony said, his voice carefully even in a way that Hank remembered from talks with HUSAC and Koening, and from California, before that. "Drop it, Hank," he added, turning to give Hank a stiff, fake smile that might have fooled him, once, before he'd spent months watching Tony smilingly present laws and programs he hated to the press. "Now isn't the time."

Tony wore guilt badly – it weighed down his shoulders like a heavy winter coat, and kept him from meeting anyone's eyes. Hank remembered that feeling, better than he wanted to.

"I already apologized," he snapped, ignoring Jan's immediate, sharp, _"Hank."_ "What else do you want?"

It was a pointless question – Thor wanted Hank and Tony to have not cloned him, obviously, because apologies didn't erase things, any more than explanations did. He wasn't going to lay out the whole sorry story of blackmail and coercion and choosing the least terrible option; extenuating circumstances didn't change what had happened, what they had done, and trying to justify themselves would be an insult. Thor would see it that way, anyway. And Hank was tired of explaining his actions to people hell-bent on putting the worst interpretation possible on them. It was useless anyway. 'We had no choice,' wouldn't bring Bill back. 'I'm sorry,' wouldn't undo taking Thor's DNA and creating a monster with it. It wouldn't change how easily they had been manipulated into building a superweapon for the very people they had been trying to control.

He pulled his hands carefully free of the vacuum chamber's gloves, and took a step away from it, feeling belatedly ashamed at the look on Jan's face. He had no right to be angry at Thor, under the circumstances.

Baron von Blitzkrieg had congratulated him on his excellent work. It was almost funny – accolades from an ex-Nazi, for something that had been yet another mistake. The clone shouldn't have been so... They had screwed up somewhere. Hank had screwed up somewhere, the way he had with Ultron. It should have been controllable from the start; they should have had more safeguards...

Thor narrowed his eyes, then stepped forward and set the glass vials down on the workbench next to the fume hood, with the care of a man who would really prefer to be smashing things. He turned to Jan, nodded at her, and said, "I will tell Captain America that the substance will be identified in some little time. I shall accompany thee back upstairs, if it be thy wish; the air here below the ground is unhealthful, and the company equally so."

"You were an even bigger challenge than Ultron," Hank said, the words feeling as if they came from someone else. "You know that? No one's ever perfected the cloning of superpowered non-humans outside of Dr. Essex's labs." His voice was too loud, too fast, the hot, edgy emotion in his chest making him feel sick, choking him. "We fucked up. It was too complicated for us, and we were in over our heads. Even Reed."

The air pressure dropped perceptibly, and Hank heard thunder rumbling in the distance, just at the border of audible sound. "Be silent, little man." Thor's voice was low, the flat words said quietly, but with enough intensity to make the test tubes neatly arrayed in their rack to Hank's left rattle. "Or I will forget all that I owe to the Avengers and deal with you as I would a warrior of Asgard who had acted thus." His eyes were narrow flickers of blue, and his hair seemed to float in a nonexistent wind for a moment, and Hank fought the urge to literally shrink down into the floor.

Abruptly, Thor turned on his heel and stormed toward the elevator, his fists clenched and his boots striking sparks off the concrete floor.

The silence after the elevator doors shut was heavy and accusing.

Hank snatched an empty test tube from the rack and pulled his arm back to throw it, the wild urge to destroy something buzzing in his head. Then he remembered Jan, perched atop the computer only a few feet away, and made himself lower his arm, setting the test tube back into place with a stiff control that made his hands shake.

Tony stared at him, a world of lesser evils and silent evenings spent sitting in a lab with Reed, all three of them wrapped in their own misery and none of them talking about it, in his eyes. Then he looked away.

Hank stared down at his right hand, at fingers curled so tightly that his knuckles hurt, and heard the faint click of Jan's heels against the concrete as she jumped down from her perch on the computer and returned to full size.

Her hand was gentle on his arm, the burgundy paint on her fingernails bright against his white lab coat. Hank blinked hard, his eyes prickling with heat, and took a deep breath. Be calm, he told himself. He could handle this.

He wasn't angry anymore, just tired, his head aching from the aftermath of too much emotion. "That went well, don't you think?" he asked Tony.

Tony, unsurprisingly, didn't answer. "You should go upstairs," Hank told Jan. "I'll be busy down here for a while." He didn't have time for any of this. He had a poison to analyze, and a paper for the _Journal of Medical Entomology_ to finish.

"Don't stay down here too long," Jan said.

Hank didn't answer. The basement lab felt even larger and colder once she and Tony had left, and even the glass-walled ant nest he'd installed in the back corner wasn't very good company.

* * *

"I still can't believe you don't know how to cook." Steve was resting his chin on his hand, looking at Tony with an irritating mix of affection and amusement.

"I can make coffee," Tony defended. He lifted his coffee mug and took a pointed sip, trying to pretend immunity to the way Steve's hair and eyelashes gleamed gold in the candlelight.

Tony had had the workmen he'd hired mimic the original building plan and even decoration wherever possible, but the kitchen in the mostly reconstructed Avengers Mansion still didn't look quite like the old one. The table was brand new, missing the scars and dents where Thor had hammered tankards down on it, the scratch marks in the veneer where an eight-year-old Cassie Lang had tried to carve her initials in it, the stains in the wood from years of hard use. The floor, walls, and appliances were all pristine, and the spot over the table where one of Steve's pen and ink sketches had once hung was bare. But the warm – and dim – glow of the candles covered a multitude of sins, and with Steve across the table from him, it was almost possible to pretend that the mansion had never been destroyed at all.

This evening certainly beat the last time the two of them had had the entire mansion to themselves, Tony reflected. Then he shoved the thought away, hard. They were moving on now, he reminded himself, putting the past behind them, and he couldn't do that if he let himself dwell on the memory of fighting Steve, of losing Steve.

_'You got him back,'_ he reminded himself. _'He's right here, so don't ruin the whole evening by brooding about the past.'_ If he let himself start, it was far too difficult to stop, even after months of Steve's solid presence at his side.

No thinking about Steve's temporary death, or the Helicarrier exploding, or Stark Industries' still lackluster performance in the stock market post the SHRA's repeal, or the way Sally Floyd kept trying to get him to agree to another interview, or fights with Thor, or the memory – the false memory – of Steve with blackened repulsor burns in the middle of his chest. It would be days, possibly a couple of weeks, before he and Steve had the opportunity to spend an evening alone like this again, so he was going to make the most of it.

"That doesn't count," Steve said. "Cooking is a basic skill."

There were times when Steve's nineteen-thirties upbringing showed. Usually in things involving musical taste, pulp literature, computers, or discussions about unions – in Steve's world, they were still vitally needed guardians of workers' welfare, rather than corrupt organizations bent on driving half the industry in the country out of business, and even the transit strike a couple of years ago hadn't convinced him otherwise – but his conviction that the ability to prepare a home-cooked meal was an essential life skill was apparently also included.

Tony set his coffee mug down next to his empty plate and smirked at Steve. "And yet, remarkably, not one I've ever needed. This is Manhattan. I can get any kind of food under the sun just by picking up a phone."

Steve's eyebrows arched skeptically. The candlelight painted them gold, too, and turned his blue eyes dark. "I thought only that one pizza place would deliver to the Avengers Mansion anymore."

That was an exaggeration, but unfortunately, not much of one. "That's not the point," Tony said. "The point is that I can pay other people to cook for me."

Steve gave Tony a slow once-over, heat in his eyes. "How are you going to pay me?"

A opening that blatant really deserved to be met with detailed descriptions, but it was late already, and describing exactly what he'd wanted to do to Steve for the past two hours, ever since he'd watched him lick spaghetti sauce off the wooden spoon he'd somehow found in Tony's unopened boxes of cookware, would have taken longer than actually doing it was going to. "I'll think of something."

Steve stood, pushing his chair back and rising to his feet in one fluid movement, and picked his plate and glass up in both hands. He rounded the table and set them down in front of Tony, laying the plate neatly on top of Tony's plate. "You can start with the dishes," he said.

Tony turned in his chair so that he was facing Steve, and let his gaze travel slowly up Steve's legs to his crotch, located conveniently at chest height. "I think I'll start with something else," he said, letting his appreciation for the view show in his voice. He reached out and set a hand on either side of Steve's waist, pulling him closer.

Steve reached down and grabbed the ends Tony's unfastened tie – he hadn't bothered to change after coming home from Stark Enterprises – and tugged upwards, as if it were a leash.

Tony stood obediently, stepping forward to mold himself against Steve's body. His hands still on Steve's waist, he pulled their hips flush together and kissed Steve, hard.

Steve had Tony bent backwards, half seated on the table, his shirt unbuttoned, when one of the Mansion's perimeter alarms went off.

The signal buzzed irritatingly in his head, via the Extremis, and Tony closed his eyes. _Damn it._

"What?" Steve asked, his hands stilling.

"Someone just tripped a perimeter alarm." Tony accessed the video feed from the security camera closest to the breach, and frowned as he pulled up the image; Sharon Carter was crouching in the shadows by the newly-restored wrought iron fence. Next to her, his arm slung over her shoulders in a way that indicated to Tony that she was bearing at least some of his weight, was the Winter Soldier. Both of them were armed, non-SHIELD-issue guns drawn and ready.

"What the hell are Winter Soldier and Agent Carter doing here?" Tony asked. He straightened up, knocking away Steve's hands as he helpfully tried to redo Tony's shirt buttons. "Did you tell either of them we were going to be here?"

Coming to the mansion for the night had been a spur-of-the-moment decision. They weren't moving back in yet, not until Steve's still-yet-to-be-unpacked boxes had been brought over and Tony had had a chance to get the downstairs engineering lab set up; tonight was supposed to be a trial run, to see if the mansion was really habitable yet, and to give Tony a chance to have Steve all to himself, away from the rest of the team. He'd been looking forward to a chance to share a bed with Steve without waking up to find Jarvis's cat chewing on his hair.

He could see his chances of that receding as Steve frowned and shook his head. "I haven't spoken to either of them in a week."

Tony took a reluctant step away from Steve and flicked on the overhead lights. "Do we have a first aid kit in here yet?"

Steve's fingers paused on his own buttons. "I think the construction crew keeps one in the living room. Why?"

"We're going to need it. Winter Soldier's injured."

Steve's eyes widened, and the last hint of arousal left his face and body. "Damn it. Why are they _here?_ The Helicarrier has state-of-the-art medical facilities." He was already moving toward the door, body language shifting subtly into crisis/command mode.

Both Sharon and the Winter Soldier stiffened and turned to run when Tony opened the front door, and he had a split second, staring into the muzzles of two guns, to realize how stupid startling injured black ops agents was, before Steve's voice came from behind him, "Put the gun away and get inside, Bucky. Sharon. Nice to see you."

Tony stepped aside to let the two of them into the mansion, closing the door behind them and locking it. Without the glow of streetlights pouring in through the open door, the front hallway was dark, but he had memorized the bottom floor of this house before he'd turned six, and without furniture, navigating it in the dark was even easier.

"This way," he told Sharon. "Bring him into the kitchen." The lights there wouldn't be visible from the front of the house, and if anyone _had_ been watching them this evening, they would probably think he and Steve had turned them back on in order to clean up after dinner.

He didn't think there was any surveillance on the mansion – he'd scanned the entire three-block radius for electronic surveillance equipment – but there was no way of knowing who, or what, might have followed Sharon and the Winter Soldier here. The briefcase containing his armor was tucked in the corner of the kitchen, with Steve's shield right next to it, so they weren't exactly unarmed, but it never hurt to be cautious.

Sharon and Steve were supporting Barnes between them now, Steve taking most of the injured man's weight. In the bright light of the kitchen, his face was pale and sweaty, overly-long brown hair sticking to his forehead. He all but fell into Steve's recently-vacated chair, wincing away when Sharon tried to pull his hand away from his ribs to get a closer look at whatever injury lay under his black clothing.

Neither he nor Sharon were wearing any SHIELD insignia, and their matte black weapons weren't SHIELD-issue, either. It looked like SHIELD was back to doing things the Nick Fury way, both above and below the table.

Barnes eyed Steve and Tony's rumpled clothing, and Tony's disheveled hair, and then his gaze went to the plates, glasses, and candles on the table, and the empty bottle that sat in the center. "Sparkling cider?" he snorted at Steve, slumping forward a little to rest one elbow on the edge of the table. "You couldn't even buy your fella real champagne?"

Steve's eyes went to Tony, as if by some kind of automatic reflex, and for a moment, Tony could almost feel the awkward silence in the air. He startled himself by laughing. Barnes didn't know about his alcoholism; not surprising, given that he had spent half the last century as a brainwashed Soviet assassin. He saw the pointedly non-alcoholic bottle on the table and his immediate reaction was not to glance awkwardly at Tony and then look away, but to mock Steve for his lack of romantic skill.

"Yeah, Steve," Tony said, before the silence could stretch long enough to be telling. "You're a lousy date. Rumiko would have brought champagne without even thinking about it." She would only have brought it for herself, though – the very first time they had gone on a date, she had brought two bottles with her, red wine for herself, and sparkling cider for him. The fact that he hadn't even had to ask that she not offer him alcohol had been one of the things that had made Tony love her, even though it had also made him want to cringe over how _relieved_ he had been that she hadn't forced him to refuse a glass of the wine that had been sitting, open, in the picnic basket right next to him, perfuming the air with its scent.

Steve had never needed to be reminded either, and he somehow managed to make the fact that he always ordered soda or water in Tony's presence seem natural.

Steve's lips twitched, but he didn't smile. "You can critique my dating skills some time when you're not bleeding all over our new kitchen floor," he told Barnes. He set the first aid kit on the table with a thump, and flipped it open, pulling out hydrogen peroxide and a roll of gauze. "This kit isn't equipped to handle serious injuries. I think we should-"

"No," Sharon said. "Don't call anyone. In fact, if anyone asks you later, we were never here."

"Fury finally decided to do something about the Sino-Lemurian situation?" Tony asked, raising his eyebrows. Reports of two prominent Lemurian expatriates' deaths had appeared about half an hour ago in one of the two newsfeeds that were all the Extremis would let him monitor full-time these days. The NYPD hadn't released a statement yet, but the local news was already calling it a murder-suicide.

Both men had substantial business holdings in both China and several African nations, and SHIELD had been trying to get the extensive arms and heroin smuggling ring they ran shut down for months through legitimate channels, with no success.

"You no longer have the security clearance necessary for me to confirm or deny that," Sharon told him, voice cool.

Tony nodded absently in acknowledgement, already accessing SHIELD's files on the current Lemurian political situation – both men had belonged to a radical faction that wanted to depose the current Empress and set up a separatist theocracy in her place – and shuffling through satellite newsfeeds one by one. Cracking the new encryption on SHIIELD's data and getting around their firewall took more effort than he had anticipated; he'd gotten used to having all of SHIELD's files at his fingertips, before he'd had to hand control of the organization back over to Fury. He didn't regret resigning as Director at all, but there were times when being locked out of SHIELD's databases once again were inconvenient. "The police are on the scene in the Upper East Side now," he said. "We probably have about six hours before the news reaches Lemuria. Was Barnes bleeding when you left the scene?"

Steve was kneeling next to Barnes now, cutting his black shirt away from his side. His eyes stayed fixed on his increasingly bloody hands as he spoke, his eyebrows drawn together in a scowl. "Tell me you didn't just assassinate a foreign national on American soil."

"Sometimes you have to get your hands dirty for the greater good," Barnes said. He pulled off his left glove and rested his forehead against the silver metal of his left palm.

Tony sympathized. A headache was already beginning to form behind his eyes; he hadn't had more than three connections open at once in the Extremis in weeks, and he'd hoped that taking it easy had given the damaged connections in his brain a chance to heal. He'd clearly been overly optimistic.

He was supposed to have a mild healing factor. What the hell had happened to that?

"I thought you were through with being a hired killer." Steve's voice was even, quiet, and his hands were gentle as he swabbed hydrogen peroxide over the three-inch slice along Barnes's ribs.

"He wasn't injured on the mission," Sharon said. She took a step away from her position just behind Barnes's chair, where she'd been not-quite-hovering, and faced Tony fully. "Sin and a dozen of her snake-themed crazies ambushed us on the way back."

"I thought your mission was classified. How did she know-" Steve started, just as Tony said,

"I thought the Dr. Faustus leak had been handled."

"There's only one person it could have been," Barnes muttered thickly. He hissed through his teeth as Steve pressed a wad of cotton gauze against his side, the material swiftly turning red. "He will be dealt with."

Steve's frown deepened, his jaw tightening. "The Red Skull is dead. Who is she taking orders from now?"

Sharon shook her head, blonde ponytail swaying with the movement. "I'm pretty sure she was acting on her own. She kept ranting about Crossbones the whole time. How he was a hero. How she was going to make us pay for his death. How she was going to make James pay for killing her. Metaphorically, I guess, that part of her had died with him." She cocked an eyebrow at Steve. "You ever read the psych profiles on those two?"

Steve looked away from her. "I wish I hadn't. It was easier to fight her when I could think of her as just another of Red Skull's flunkies, rather than one of his victims."

"Don't feel sorry for her," Barnes mumbled into his hands. "She gets her jollies by torturing people. I should know."

Steve didn't reply to that, but Tony could see his anger in the stiff set of his shoulders and the way his hands suddenly became even more careful, their movements more precise. A lot had happened while Steve had been... gone... and Sharon and Barnes had clearly seen no more reason to fill Steve in on certain specific details about their attempts to take down Red Skull than Tony had to tell Steve about some of the nastier things he and Hank and Reed had had to do to try and keep Norman Osborn off their backs and Dickstein and his committee appeased. Most of it had come out in the congressional hearings, anyway. There had been no need to rehash it.

No need to relive it.

A lot of those two months after Steve had been shot were a grey blank in Tony's memory, anyway, the details fuzzier than he would have cared to admit, especially to Steve.

"This shouldn't be bleeding so much," Steve muttered, almost to himself. He held a hand out, and Tony and Sharon both moved to place another wad of gauze in it, their shoulders nearly colliding. The soaked gauze went into the sink, little threads of blood seeping out from the soggy material into the surrounding water.

The pristine black and white tiles of the floor, handmade by a company in Brooklyn that reproduced 1920s-style ceramics, were smeared with mud from Barnes and Sharon's boots now, and the new-paint smell in the air had been drowned out by the scent of blood. They'd have to clean the entire place before the construction crew returned tomorrow morning.

What did you use to get mud and blood off of floor tiles? Jarvis would know, Tony thought.

He glanced back at Steve and Barnes and frowned; the fresh gauze was already spotted with blood. Too much blood to come from a shallow cut no more than a handspan in length.

"You're right," he told Steve. "The bleeding should be slowing by now."

Barnes moaned, and mumbled something in Russian, too low for Tony to make out. His pupils were dilated wide, making his eyes look black in the bright overhead lighting, and he was breathing shallowly, a barely audible wheezing note underlying each breath.

"He says his head hurts," Sharon translated. She put one hand on the side of Barnes's face, and swore. "James, you're-"

"I'm going to be sick," he interrupted, voice perfectly calm.

Steve had him on his feet and bent over the sink with commendable speed, supporting his weight while Sharon held his ridiculously floppy hair out of his face.

Tony reached for the Extremis and opened a connection to Hank's cell phone.

_*Tony,*_ Hank's voice sounded inside his head, slightly tinny the way voices filtered through both cellular connections and the Extremis always were. _*Next time you spend the night at the mansion, take your damn cat with you, or I'm going to kill it. That is, if Sam doesn't just feed it to Redwing. It's been wandering around the apartment_ crying _for you.*_

_*Don't feed him,*_ Tony answered automatically. _*It'll only encourage him. Look, I need your help. Can you come to the mansion? And bring that portable lab of yours, and whatever anti-venoms you've got on hand?*_

_*What happened?*_ The alarm in Hank's voice came through loud and clear, despite the crackle of static in the connection.

_*Agent Thirteen and the Winter Soldier are here, and I think Barnes has been poisoned.*_ He repeated the second half of the sentence out loud, and Sharon's head snapped up.

"That bitch. I knew she and her men gave up too easily."

"Call Hank," Steve said quietly. His voice had gone icy calm, the way it did when he was intensely angry – or scared.

"I just did."

Barnes spat into the sink, then mumbled something inaudible.

"James?" Sharon asked. She had one hand on the back of his neck, the kind of touch that spoke of intimacyx.

"I kept the knife," he repeated, more loudly. "Took it 'way from the sonuvabitch who cut me, after I broke 'is wrist. S'in my coat pocket."

"Good," Steve said. "That's good, Bucky. We can have Hank test it."

"He's on his way now," Tony added. Then, "If this were fatal, he'd probably be dead already. The wound's at least half an hour old, and the poison was introduced directly into his bloodstream." He resisted the impulse to google Barnes's symptoms via Extremis; his trying to diagnose someone via the internet would be about as useful as someone else trying to fix an engine using information from a Wikipedia article. Hank would be here soon, and this kind of thing was his specialty. He'd identified the toxin A.I.M. had released downtown last month in a few hours, and that had been a chemical cocktail designed by A.I.M.'s top scientists; it was doubtful that Sin had that kind of talent at her disposal these days. Sin was erratic even for a supervillain, and didn't possess her father's ability to manipulate people.

Sharon shook her head jerkily. "This is Sin. She likes to hurt people. For all we know it's something designed to kill slowly and painfully."

Barnes straightened in Steve's grasp, pushing away from the sink with his hands. "Doesn't hurt that much. M'side hurts, an' it's getting hard to breathe." He offered Sharon a slightly shaky smile. "You could suck the poison out."

"Unknown toxins are not on the short list of fluids I'm willing to suck from your body," she said dryly.

Steve pulled a face, the expression failing to disguise the worry in his eyes. "I like to pretend you're still fourteen and not sleeping with my ex-girlfriend. Please don't destroy that fantasy."

Then Barnes started throwing up again, the kind of dry, wracking heaves you made when there was nothing left in your stomach to expel, and all joking abruptly ceased.

When Hank arrived fifteen minutes later, Barnes was slumped in one of the kitchen chairs with his head resting on his folded arms, breath wheezing painfully in his lungs. Sharon was sitting next to him, one hand on his shoulder, while Steve hovered awkwardly in the background.

Tony had run out of reassuring things to say to Steve five minutes ago, and was now left silent and useless, with nothing to do but check the Lemurian situation repeatedly and hack into SHIELD's files on Sin.

She'd last been seen with Red Skull, but had dropped off the radar shortly before Steve had come back. Why make her move against Sharon and Barnes now? Crossbones had been dead for three months.

Hank took one look at Barnes and began pulling tiny scientific instruments out of his pockets, laying them out along the table and counters and returning them to their full size. "Where was the knife between being stuck into his side and one of you putting it there?" he asked, pointing a finger at the weapon that lay in the middle of the kitchen table, dried blood flaking off its four-inch steel blade. It looked vaguely like an SS dagger that had had a new, snake-shaped hilt welded onto it, save for the addition of several small grooves that ran the length of the blade.

"His pocket," Sharon said.

Hank frowned, then shrugged one shoulder. "I guess it doesn't matter that much. If his blood is still on it, traces of the toxin will be as well, especially in those little grooves. That's probably the reason they're there."

He stared down at the knife for a moment, then touched one surgical-glove-covered finger to its hilt, which had been cast to look like a coiled serpent. "Vomiting, headache, difficulty breathing... did he complain about his fingers going numb? Is the wound unusually swollen?"

Steve nodded. "It looks like it's been infected for days, and it took too long to get it to stop bleeding."

"Pit viper venom." Hank said firmly, as if there were no room for doubt, but he was already moving smoothly to a rack of test tubes and a miniaturized spectrometer to test the swab he'd taken from the knife blade. "There's a standard anti-venom for that, if it's from one of the common North American species."

"Don't assume that," Steve told him. "It could be from anywhere. And snake venom is just a guess."

Hank's eyebrows arched upwards. "With a knife shaped like that? At least if it's snake venom, we'll know it's not one of the deadliest species. Most of the really poisonous Australian ones will kill a man within minutes."

"Stark said that." Sharon's voice was low, the tension in it audible. "It wasn't helpful then, either."

"I found it helpful," Barnes mumbled into the table.

"And it _is_ snake venom," Hank added, only a moment later. "The protein structure is distinctive. It's rattlesnake venom. A mix of Crotalus Horridus and-"

"Good." Steve said flatly. "You can give him the anti-venom now, and then he'll be fine."

Hank shook his head. "I don't have rattlesnake anti-venom, or any other kind of snake anti-venom. I work with insects," he added quickly, as Steve's eyes narrowed.

"The Helicarrier has it," Tony announced. "I just checked their medical stores." It was one of the less secure sections of Fury's data files, with only two layers of password protection. SHIELD didn't generally have to worry about people stealing their drugs to sell on the street – there were far more valuable things to be stolen on the Helicarrier, if you knew the right person to sell them to.

He could feel the tightness and pressure in his temples and behind his eyes that signaled the beginnings of a headache, despite the fact that he'd barely used a fraction of Extremis's capabilities. It wasn't painful enough yet to indicate a real problem, though, or to hinder him in any meaningful way, so he connected to Fury's private line, the one he wasn't supposed to have the number to, and waited.

_*I told ya not to call me, kid,*_ Fury's gravelly voice echoed in his head. _*Yer supposed to maintain radio silence until-*_

_*It's me, not Barnes,*_ Tony answered. _*Your solution to the Lemurian problem has developed complications.*_

It took only a few minutes to arrange for Fury to discover a sudden issue with the Helicarrier's engines that required Tony's urgent assistance. Tony spent most of those minutes carefully explaining how to cause the problem in the first place, and how to make it look as if the damage had been caused by the Helicarrier's long immersion under New York Harbor.

Steve and Sharon were the ones who got Barnes up and on his feet again, and the ones who snuck him into the trunk of the flying car Fury sent down to fetch Tony. They worked together with a smoothness that spoke of experience, and Tony bit back a sudden jealousy. He'd read both their SHIELD files. He knew they'd been on any number of missions together. He also knew exactly what had happened between them while Sharon had been under Dr. Faustus's control, and being jealous of a woman who had been mindcontrolled into sleeping with Steve and then shooting him was petty and wrong.

Whatever the two of them had once had between them had been destroyed by Faustus's meddling, and the fact that they had been able to salvage a friendship out of that wreckage was a testament to both of them. Sharon hadn't been responsible for taking Steve away from him – it had been Red Skull's doing, and Faustus's, and his own, for giving them the opportunity.

He wasn't going to think about that, Tony reminded himself. Steve was back now. Nothing else mattered. And there were more important things to focus on right now.

By the time he returned to the mansion, the Helicarrier's engines repaired and Barnes under observation in SHIELD's infirmary, it was four in the morning, and Hank had long since gone back to Stark Tower.

Steve was still awake, of course. He was waiting for Tony in the kitchen, where he had washed and put away all the dishes from dinner and cleaned up every trace of Barnes's blood.

"They gave him a shot of anti-venom and some steroids for his lungs," he told Steve. "The SHIELD medics think he'll be fine."

Steve's shoulders sagged in relief, and he rubbed a hand over his face. "Good," he said. "I knew he'd be okay."

Tony put a hand on his arm, giving in to the impulse to touch him, and didn't contradict the obvious lie. "Someday, we will manage a date that does not end in supervillains or disaster."

"Or SHIELD business, or some Stark Enterprises crisis that requires your presence on a conference call to Japan at five in the morning," Steve returned, but his eyes crinkled at the edges with a smile that didn't quite reach his lips.

Tony took a step closer to him, until he could feel Steve's body heat through his clothing. It was probably wishful thinking, but just being near him seemed to make Tony's headache fade a little bit.

"Hank thinks she didn't intend to kill him," Steve said, leaning into Tony's touch. "Sin is insane, but she's not incompetent; if she had wanted him dead tonight there would have been something more immediately lethal on that knife blade."

Tony nodded. "That's what I told Fury. He's more concerned with eliminating his leak at the moment than with her, though." Fury took betrayal seriously, especially among those SHIELD agents who'd survived the destruction of the new Helicarrier. The man responsible for relaying Barnes and Agent Carter's location to Sin was either going to spend a long time being de-programmed, or, if Faustus hadn't hypnotized him into it, was probably never going to be seen again.

Once upon a time, that would have bothered him. It still did, but in a distant, abstract way; Tony had gone along with much worse things in the name of expediency and national security over the past year. One corrupt SHIELD agent's death wasn't going to keep him awake at night, especially not one who'd sold out people Steve cared about – it was the innocent people who did that. Bill Foster. Happy. The minor supervillain who'd committed suicide in the negative zone prison, whose name Tony hadn't even known until he'd read the man's file.

Tony rubbed his thumb up and down Steve's bicep, the familiar warmth of his skin obscurely comforting, and leaned in a little closer. "We never got a chance to finish what we started earlier," he said, lowering his eyes to glance at Steve's crotch. "I think you said I owed you something for cooking for me."

Steve's eyes darkened, and he lifted a hand, reaching for Tony, then hesitated. "Bucky and Sharon killed someone tonight, didn't they," he said softly. "On Nick's orders."

Tony nodded. "Probably. Or they arranged for it to happen." Steve smelled like lemons, the earlier scents of spaghetti sauce and blood erased by dish soap. Cleaning products, he suspected, shouldn't smell so enticing.

"You didn't seem surprised." Steve said it carefully, as if he were feeling something out, and Tony winced.

"I ran SHIELD for three months. And I had no illusions about how Fury's people worked even befor that. Compared to the CIA, their consciences are spotless."

Steve's jaw tightened. "That doesn't mean I have to like it. And it doesn't mean it's right."

"No," Tony agreed. "It's not. But what's right isn't always enough to get the job done."

"You're quoting Nick."

"Dugan, actually."

Steve nodded. "You didn't seem surprised," he said again. "You were already thinking about how to keep their mission from being compromised while all I could think about was getting Bucky to stop bleeding. How many missions like this did you help clean up while you were running SHIELD?"

"More than one. But what you really want to know if whether I ordered any, isn't it?"

Steve looked away, and didn't answer.

"You shouldn't ask questions you don't really want the answers to." Tony sighed, and offered a half-truth. "I didn't order any assassinations as head of SHIELD." It was technically true, if not the whole truth. If Steve wanted to know more, he was perfectly capable of pushing Tony until he told him. Which Tony would do, eventually. Now, though, he was tired, and it was late, and Steve had spent half the evening wrist deep in a friend's blood. And once Steve knew, he would never look at Tony quite the same way again – most of the things he had done had come out in the Senate investigation, but there was always more. The blood on his hands wasn't going to wash off with soap and water. "I didn't ask many questions when Dugan asked for permission to do things 'the Nick Fury way', but I didn't give him any orders that violated SHIELD's official protocol."

Steve's fingers closed around his wrist, tugging his hand away from his face, and only then did Tony realize that he had been rubbing the bridge of his nose.

"You hated running SHIELD," Steve said flatly. "It was killing you, the same way working with Dickstein and Koening was."

"You were dead." Even months later, it still hurt to say the words. "I needed to do damage control, to keep everyone else safe. If I hadn't stepped in, things would have been even worse."

"I know." Steve smiled wryly. His fingers were still wrapped around Tony's wrist, his thumb rubbing over the scar that curved around the base of Tony's thumb. "I know," he said again, and lifted Tony's hand to his lips.

Tony closed his eyes, drawing in a long breath as Steve's tongue flicked over his skin. "There's a bed upstairs. Not as study as the one at the tower, but..."

"That _would_ be the first piece of furniture you got," said Steve, and Tony yanked him close and set about trying to make both of them forget the past few hours.

* * *

The warehouse was lit only by the grey, early-morning light that filtered through its dust-streaked windows. The old building was in the process of being converted into expensive loft apartments, but the nineteenth century core of the structure was still visible in the thick brick walls and the windows' arched tops.

Much of the older architecture in this city aped gothic designs, some of the skyscrapers even including gargoyles on their roofs, as if the American builders had sought to compensate for the history and culture they lacked by decorating Manhattan with pale imitations of it.

The warehouse was owned by a local development firm who were business partners with a holding company that was owned by a man who was owned by Latveria. The construction crews who would be arriving here in a few hours had no more idea that their wages were coming from Latveria's royal treasury than their employers did, which was precisely as it should be. Doom had just finished tying up the long and tedious negotiations that had been necessary for him to visit United States soil once more, and he had no intention of watching his carefully laid plans come to nothing via interference from the American department of Homeland Security if he were discovered meeting with a known and internationally wanted terrorist.

Foreign governments became difficult to work with when one was required to murder their officials, and while Doom would hopefully soon be beyond the need to worry about such petty details, that happy hour had not yet come.

When it did, one of the first things he was going to do was force the imbecilic woman currently pouting defiantly up at him to kneel at his feet. Then he was going to kill her. Whether the method he chose would be swift or slow would depend upon how well she managed to redeem herself from last night's disaster.

"We had a plan," he said, keeping his voice level with a supreme effort of will. If he shouted in here, the sound would echo off the roof and walls and be audible outside. "No part of the plan involved you attacking SHIELD agents in Central Park." He slammed a mailed fist into the wall, feeling brick crumble under his hand; it wasn't as satisfying as putting the same fist through her empty skull would be, but it would have to suffice. "Your rash actions have cost us the element of surprise. Every fool in a costume will be on guard now, knowing that you're in the city."  
Seemingly unimpressed, Sin folded both arms over her chest, glaring at him. "He killed Brock. I want him to suffer. And he shot Daddy in the head. He needs to pay." She said the words with a degree of venom completely at odds with her cheerful, freckle-faced appearance. "I wanted him to know I was coming for him."

"You will get your revenge later," Doom said, with admirable patience. "After we've gotten the spear." There was a reason he usually preferred not to work with the criminally insane, and he was reminded of that anew with each day of his association with Synthia Schmidt. The Red Skull might have been Nazi scum, but at least he had been coherent and lucid. And the thought of how deeply it would have offended the Red Skull to know that he would have owed his ultimate revenge over his greatest enemy to one of the undesirable people his kind had wanted to destroy had almost made the struggle to stand in his presence and not kill him worth it. Doom had savored that thought almost as much as he now savored the fact that it had been his own actions in reviving Steve Rogers from the dead that had brought about the Red Skull's demise. "You do remember the spear, don't you?" he asked the Skull's psychotic daughter, not bothering to keep the contempt from his voice.

Sin looked at him with cold, flat eyes. "Yes, I remember your stupid spear." She took a step closer to him, leaning up on tiptoe to press the point of one of her snake-handled daggers against his mask. There was a small, scraping sound as metal dragged against metal. "Don't underestimate me, Victor. Daddy thinks you're trying to manipulate us. I don't care, as long as I get to make Barnes and Rogers and the others pay for what they did to him, but _he_ doesn't like it."

"You will address me as Doom," he said, not acknowledging her reference to the Red Skull. "Synthia." If he humored her delusions about hearing her deceased father's voice in her head, they would be here all morning. While it was just possible that the cosmic cube could have allowed the Red Skull to enter her body after the death of Aleksander Lukin, the man who had served as his previous host, such a possession would have left some form of magical residue. Lukin's possession had been nearly impossible to detect if one had not been looking for it, for Doom _had_ searched for signs that Sin was telling the truth about her father's presence. Repeatedly.

"You know that's not my name, Victor. Not my real one, anyway." She removed the tip of the dagger from his mask and slid the weapon back into the scabbard at her thigh, probably intending the action to be erotic.

"I do not care what you prefer to be called. And if you wish to continue our association, you will stay away from Barnes. He is unimportant. Only Strange and Murdock matter." And Richards, of course, but Doom would see to him later. Once he possessed the power locked within Baldur's Bane, he would make Richards grovel at his feet. The thought of the man's skinny body writhing in agony on the flagstone before him was a pleasure to indulge in later, however.

She tossed copper curls over her shoulder, pouting again. "I still don't see why I can't just kill the lawyer for you."

"Because if you do so at my instigation," Doom snarled, "it will be the same, metaphysically speaking, as if I had murdered him myself, and the spear will be permanently sealed from us." Curse Strange for his thrice-damned interference, anyway. The spell barring Doom from the spear was a continual insult, too strong and subtle for even a sorcerer of Doom's abilities to break, and the fact that Strange had tied it to a person rather than to the spear's resting place was like a great, ticking clock working against him. If he was not able to act before Murdock inevitably got himself slaughtered by some supervillain or walked in front of a city bus, the locus of the spell would change, and he would have to begin his efforts to find a way around it all over again.

He should have had the spear months ago. Would have, had Strange not thrust his overly-long nose in where it was not wanted. If he did not have it by the equinox... The dark forces would not be aligned properly for another seven years, after that.

The need to act swiftly was an irritant in the back of his mind, continually running up against the need to handle Sin with care, and curb her bloodthirst and anarchistic tendencies. Yet one more indignity to make Strange pay for, given that it was his spell that made her presence necessary.

"The spear first," he repeated. "Then we can seek vengeance against those who deserve it." Personally, he was going to begin with Strange and the Avengers, for thwarting his plans before. Reed Richards, he would save for last. That piece of revenge had been a long time coming, and Doom intended to savor it.


	3. Chapter 3

**Chapter Three**

Strange's Sanctum Sanctorum had been disguised as an under-construction Starbucks, complete with a limp banner that proclaimed an opening date several months away. The familiar metal construction scaffolding and black safety netting that one saw all over the city had almost entirely obscured the building's Victorian façade – until Wanda looked more closely, and the construction debris wavered and faded, glimpses of the untouched house beneath the illusion showing through.

It was nearly full dark now, the sun having set some ten blocks ago, and she could feel the raw throbbing of a blister on her left heel. When she had come to a stop where Dr. Strange's house should be and seen a vacant building she had wanted to scream with frustration– she had nowhere else to go, and was so tired that part of her just wanted to curl up on the ground and go to sleep, except that that would have meant handing herself back over to Chthon – and the realization that it wasn't empty after all seemed to drain the rest of her energy from her.

She would be safe now. One way or another, Strange could keep Chthon away.

Wanda let her carry-on bag fall to the muddy ground of Strange's minuscule front yard – a tiny patch of green that was a spacious luxury by Manhattan standards – and limped up the front steps, walking straight through the non-existent "Starbucks – Coming Spring of '08" banner.

The knocker on Strange's door was heavy, made out of some kind of metal that looked like brass and hummed under her fingers like something formed of far less commonplace materials. She had been here dozens of times, and each time, the pattern engraved into the metal had been slightly different.

A long moment of silence followed her knock, and the door failed to open. She raised her hand and hammered on the wood with her fist, and was considering kicking it when she finally heard the scrape of a bolt being drawn back, and a low murmuring that sounded like someone disarming a magical ward.

Wong's eyes went wide when he saw her standing on the threshold.

"I need help," Wanda blurted out before he could say anything, or make a move to treat her as a potential threat. "Please, I have to see Strange."

She must have looked even more exhausted and bedraggled than she felt, because Wong didn't even ask any questions; he just stepped aside and let her in.

Hours later, Wanda sat on the sofa in Strange's study, drinking tea and watching the sky outside his huge, round window slowly shading into dawn. She felt empty, hollowed out, and so exhausted that she no longer felt like sleeping – just an ache in her head and a gritty burn in her eyes.

Strange, seated across from her and cradling a cup of tea in both gloved hands, looked nearly as worn out as she felt, the bones of his face standing out harshly; crafting seals strong enough to stand against a being as powerful as Chthon was a massive magical work, and even the Sorcerer Supreme apparently could not do it easily. Before he had set the seal on her, he had seemed magnetically appealing, attractive in a way she'd never seen before – even Vision and Simon couldn't have compared to the power Chthon's essence had sensed in him, and the trace of Chthon's taint in Wanda had been drawn to it, had wanted to pour itself into him, possess him as it had her.

Then the black, angular lines of the seals had formed on her skin – on her hands, on the back of her neck – and Chthon's presence had ceased battering at the frayed edges of the mental walls she'd thrown up against him as abruptly as a candle being blown out. Now, Strange seemed like an ordinary man, no more or less appealing than any other, and the ceaseless whispering that had echoed through her skull for longer than she could remember was finally silent.

Chthon had used her to murder. To attack and kill and destroy the people she loved. And then he'd tried to use her to destroy the world, manipulating her and Pietro both into it. And then...

She couldn't think of a more terrible use of her powers, save for mass slaughter. To strip people's mutations away – it was like rape, like mutilation. And to do it to all mutantkind came sickeningly close to genocide, in intent if not in actuality.

All her power had been tied up in maintaining the spell, Strange had said, in magically suppressing the expression of thousands upon thousands of X-genes. When she had broken free of Chthon and cut the spell loose, she had ended the flow of power that had sustained it.

"The shockwaves of your struggle against Chthon yesterday afternoon reverberated through this entire plane of reality," Strange was saying. "I could feel the universe attempting to restore itself to its proper shape, to correct the damage done, like air rushing in to fill a vacuum. I suspect that if one of us were to turn on a television, the news would be filled with accounts of mutants whose powers have been miraculously and abruptly restored."

"But not all of them," Wanda said.

"No," he agreed, "not all of them. Likely not even half. Undoing the spell in its entirety would take far more power than either of us possesses."

"But I was the one who cast it in the first place," she said, softly, hating the truth in the words. "Couldn't I-"

"No," Strange interrupted, holding up a hand to cut her off. "You cast the spell while possessed by Chthon, with his power amplifying your own. To completely undo it, you would need to channel Chthon's power again."

She shuddered, the thought of the hours – _months_ – she'd spent as a prisoner in her own mind making her stomach twist. If she tapped into Chthon's powers to augment her own, he would have her again, seals or no seals. Strange's spells were powerful, but the seals that protected her could be broken if she put them under enough pressure.

Wanda stared down at her hands, at the circular, symmetrical marks that now decorated the backs of them. They looked like tattoos, black as ink against her skin, but where fresh tattoos would have stung and throbbed, these were painless. It hadn't been painless when Strange and Wong had put them on, Wong drawing them on her skin with a brush and ink while Strange chanted an invocation to the Vishanti that had seemed to last for hours. His voice had risen to a crescendo at the end, and the drying ink on her skin had burned like acid for one terrible, endless moment, as Chthon's scream of wrath had echoed in her head, then cut off as abruptly as a door slamming.

She twisted her fingers around each other, not looking back up to where Strange sat mercifully silent. The place inside her where Chthon had been felt empty, blessedly quiet. Her powers felt quiet, too. The last thing she could remember clearly before Mount Wundagore was chaos magic surging through her, warping the world around her at her slightest whim, too powerful for her to control, for anyone to control.

Strange's seals had walled that away from her, too. Her powers were back under her conscious control again, he'd promised her. They wouldn't be as strong as they had been while Chthon had had her – he had forced her mutation to Omega levels, altered it to suit his whims until she could mold the world around her in ways that probability altering or chaos energy should never have been able to accomplish – but they were hers again, and if she had less energy to fuel her hexes, it was a small price to pay for freedom.

It was even fitting, in a way. She had shut down thousands of people's powers; losing some of hers in order to prevent such a thing from happening again was an odd kind of justice.

"I am afraid," Strange's voice broke the silence abruptly, "that I owe you an apology."

Jolted out of her reverie, Wanda looked up at him. "For what? I can't thank you enough. You probably saved my sanity."

Strange hesitated, looking almost embarrassed. It was not an emotion she normally associated with the Sorcerer Supreme. "Your teammates called me in to help them when your magic went out of control." His voice was hoarse, the wear of hours' worth of spell casting obvious despite the calm, unruffled air he projected. He'd put at least four spoonfuls of sugar into the tea he was drinking; Wanda had always assumed that her own shaky hunger after major spells and hexes was an effect of having an energy mutation, but it apparently affected him the same way. "I assumed you had accessed a higher level of your powers, or developed a secondary mutation, and that the new, reality-altering nature of your powers had driven you mad. Omega-level mutants are almost invariably unstable, and many magicians lose their grip on this reality after too long spent on other planes of existence."

"You put me to sleep," she said slowly, remembering.

Strange winced, but didn't look away. "I didn't notice Chthon's presence in your mind. It didn't even occur to me to look. It was an arrogant mistake, and one that has cost you and many others a great deal."

It was probably the most abject apology she was ever going to hear from him. Strange was not a man who admitted to mistakes easily. "I didn't notice him either," Wanda said, unsure if she was angry at Strange or not. If he'd been able to set the seals on her then, before Chthon had taken control of her completely and started to influence Pietro... "I don't even know how long he was there, pretending to be Agatha."

"When your teammates searched Agatha Harkness's house, she had been dead for some time. I'm afraid he may have been influencing you for far longer than anyone suspected."

Wanda thought of Agatha dying alone, of her being replaced by some form of construct that had pretended to be her for months without any of her friends ever noticing, and shuddered. "He killed her, too?"

"There's no way of knowing that." Strange waved a hand, dismissing her guilt. "Chthon may simply have taken advantage of her death and the closeness of her relationship to you and used the opportunity to manipulate you."

The thought that Agatha's death might not have occurred at Chthon's hands was little comfort. Even if that was the case, it wouldn't bring her back, and the weight of the months she had spent believing in something that wasn't Agatha, neither missing her nor mourning her, loomed oppressively over her. It was only one of many regrets.

"He used me to destroy the Avengers. How much did I..." she trailed off, then tried again. "Is everyone that's... left... okay?"

She shoved away the memory of Vision disintegrating in front of her eyes and braced herself for Strange's answer.

He hesitated, clearly choosing his words with care. "There's been a great deal of trouble and conflict in your absence, as I'm sure you've heard."

Wanda nodded dully. The Registration Act. Steve's death. During the long walk from St. Margaret's, she'd managed to piece together more than she'd wanted to from her fragmented memories of Clint's conversation.

"The SHRA has, thankfully, been repealed-"

Wanda closed her eyes for a moment, surprised at the strength of the relief she felt. She hadn't been aware of the Registration Act while it had been in effect, but just the name was chilling. Superhuman Registration. Mutant Registration. Even before Bishop and Cable and the X-Men's other travelers from future time-lines had arrived with doomsday warnings about the future, she had known where those kind of political policies led. Everyone who'd ever been a member of the Brotherhood of Mutants knew; Magneto had made sure of it.

First they made you put your name down on an official list, so they could 'keep track of you.' Then they marked you, so they could tell you apart from the normal people, for 'the public good.' Then the sentinels came for you.

Of all of Magneto's rhetoric, that had been the one part she'd never had trouble believing.

"-and Iron Man and Captain America have, ah, resolved their differences and reformed an Avengers team."

Iron Man and—

Wanda stared at him, not daring to believe that she'd heard that correctly. "I thought Cap was dead," she interrupted.

"He got better," Strange said dryly. "Victor von Doom brought him back from the dead with black magic. I was able to intervene and make the situation permanent."

"Brought him back? As in, really back? Not dead?" If she sounded silly, it was difficult to care. Only this morning, she had been sure that almost everyone she loved was gone, in no small part through her own actions. Knowing that they weren't–

She blinked suddenly hot eyes as Strange nodded – "Yes, really not dead," – and drew in a long, shaky breath. Steve was alive. Clint was alive. Simon and Tony were alive. She still had family left, despite Chthon's best efforts.

She'd already asked about Pietro, even though just the thought of what Strange might say had filled her stomach with a sick, hollow pain, but he had been able to tell her nothing, offering only the vague reassurance that Chthon had probably not been able to possess him the way he had Wanda, and that he'd likely been able to influence him only while he'd been in close physical proximity to her. Did her brother still have his powers? Had he been one of the lucky ones who'd been spared, or one of the people her spell had destroyed? Even if he had been, it didn't mean—his powers might have been restored last night, when she had ended the spell. His mutation was primarily energy-based, like hers, like Magneto's. It had been the people with major physical mutations who had died, and the mutants with flying powers who had been airborne. Unless Pietro had been running over water. He did that, sometimes, just to show off, or for the sheer joy of running as far as he could without needing to slow down.

Just because Strange had heard nothing didn't necessarily mean he was dead. Strange had little contact with the X-Men or any other mutant organization, outside of the occasional meeting with Xavier, and Pietro was unlikely to go to anyone who was neither a mutant nor an Avenger for help.

The X-Men would know for certain, would probably be able to give her every detail of what had happened to her brother over the past year, but asking them was out of the question. No mutant who knew what she had done was ever going to willingly speak to her again. Not to the woman who had accomplished with one sentence what Reverend Stryker and dozens of other anti-mutant Extremists had tried to achieve for decades. Even Pietro, if he was all right, might not want anywhere near him.

How could she look him in the eyes, now, after everything both of them had done?

No. She took another deep breath and made herself focus on positive things. Steve was alive. Clint was alive. The superhuman population was not going to be rounded up and imprisoned. Chthon couldn't touch her anymore, as long as she was careful in using her powers. Some of the people she had hurt had been healed, when she'd broken the spell suppressing their X genes.

"I can take you back to your teammates," Strange offered several minutes later, when both of their teacups were empty and Wanda had regained some of her composure.

She wanted to refuse, a small, cowardly part of her wanting to put for as long as possible the moment when she would have to see her friends and family face-to-face and apologize for what she had done to them. Warring with that, though, was the need to see the rest of the Avengers for herself, to assure herself that Steve, Clint, Simon, and the others truly were all right. To go _home_, finally.

"I'd like to get some sleep first, if you and Wong don't mind putting me up for the night. Or, well, the day."

Strange shrugged, an elegant motion. "After my failure to help you earlier, a place to sleep is the least I can do."

* * *

"I don't even know what's in half of these." Steve gestured at the cardboard boxes that were stacked neatly along the walls of their newly completed bedroom, each one labeled in Jarvis's precise script. They had spent the past month stacked in his and Tony's bedroom in Stark Tower, and the months before that in a closet somewhere; Steve had gotten used to living out of a suitcase and one borrowed drawer in Tony's dresser.

He wasn't sure which was stranger: the fact that his entire life could be packed away in a dozen boxes, or the fact that he'd once had so much _stuff_.

"Just pick one and open it," Tony suggested from the bed, where he was leaning back on his elbows and looking thoroughly debauched in a way that begged to be sketched, if only Steve had known which box held his art supplies. "I don't know what's in them, either." His own collection of boxes was smaller than Steve's, but only because at least sixty percent of the things he'd wanted to bring over from the tower were already sitting downstairs in the mansion's lab. Several of the larger pieces of equipment had had to be hauled over via quinjet.

Steve picked the nearest box, labeled 'bookshelf,' and sliced through the packing tape that held it closed. Inside, a small stuffed bear in a felt copy of his costume lay atop a stack of books, staring up at him with its black, plastic eyes. 'You have adopted Captain A-bear-ica,' read the paper tag attached to its left paw. It had appeared in his room one Valentines Day, with no card or note to tell him whom it had come from; Steve had always suspected Clint. Clint found any and all Captain America-themed merchandise hilarious, and probably owned every embarrassing and creepy attempt to make money off Steve's fame ever manufactured.

This particular attempt, though, Steve hadn't minded. He picked it up, smiling, and held it up for Tony to see. "I can't believe Jarvis kept this."

Tony eyed the little toy with a smirk. "I can't believe you kept it. I thought you hated all that Captain America merchandise they used to sell. Which you really ought to have gotten some sort of royalties for, by the way."

"I thought it was cute." Steve set the bear down on top of a still-closed box and inspected the books he'd been packed with. A half-dozen paperback fantasy novels, one of which he vaguely remembered reading just before the SHRA had been passed; he'd never finished it. A book on twentieth century labor history that he'd bought just after he and Tony had started the New Avengers, and had never gotten around to reading. Then the yellowed edge of a battered paperback with warped, water-damaged pages caught his eye, and he reached for it automatically, already knowing what it had to be.

Bucky had carried that copy of _A Tree Grows in Brooklyn_ though half of France, and through Italy before that; it was probably a miracle that it was still readable, after all this time.

"I should give this back to Bucky," he said, carefully working it free from its spot between a Terry Pratchett novel and a leather bound copy of _The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes_. "It used to be his." The paper was soft, worn, and when he opened it, the pages still smelled like mildew and the mothballs the Army had packed it in, during the long decades he had spent in the ice.

The Army had given it back to Steve when he'd been unfrozen, tucked into the single cardboard box that had held all his remaining possessions. They had been carefully stored away in a government warehouse somewhere for "posterity," Bucky's things jumbled together with his own, because there'd been no next of kin to claim them when the two of them been reported dead. He'd barely touched it since then, afraid that if he handled it too much, it would start to fall apart.

"We don't even have a bookshelf in here yet." Tony's voice came from directly behind him, moments before his arms slid around Steve's waist. He rested the sharp point of his chin on Steve's shoulder, the edges of his goatee rasping against Steve's neck distractingly. "Leave those for later and come help me test if the bed is sturdy enough."

"It's sturdy," Steve told him. "We tested it very thoroughly."

"Yes, but that was two days ago. Materials can weaken over time." Tony hands moved downward, to the fly of Steve's jeans. "Metal fatigue builds up," he laid an open-mouthed kiss on the side of Steve's neck, mouth hot against Steve's skin, "wood warps..."

Steve turned in Tony's arms, his jeans already painfully tight, and settled his hands on Tony's hips, pulling Tony against him. "You're supposed to be helping me unpack," he said, sliding his fingers beneath the waistband of Tony's trousers and kneading at the dense curves of muscle in Tony's ass.

"We can do that later," Tony mumbled into the side of Steve's neck, and the vibrations of his voice against Steve's skin sent heat rushing down his body. "I have a business meeting in an hour, and D.C. keeps calling me about the mutant thing." He ground his hips against Steve's groin, his voice going low and rough, and Steve shuddered, gripping him harder. "Fury apparently told Koening and Gyrich to go do something anatomically impossible the last time they bothered him, and they think I'll have some kind of special insight into what SHIELD's going to do about it. Or that I'm still the government's pet superhero." Tony slid a hand into Steve's hair, turning his face toward his, and kissed him, slow and deep.

Steve broke the kiss, biting at Tony's lower lip just hard enough for him to feel it before he pulled away. "I can't imagine why they would think that." He took a few steps forward, nudging Tony ahead of him until the back of Tony's thighs were pressed against a stack of boxes; the entire stack would probably topple over if both of them rested their weight against it. "Try telling them no for once."

Tony's lips curved into a lopsided smile that only made the ache in Steve's body hotter and harder. His pupils were wide and dark, his lips parted slightly, and his hair was falling into his face, already disheveled from the effort of lugging boxes around. Someone else might have just looked sweaty and tired—Tony looked as if he'd just finished having hot, sweaty sex with someone, and was looking forward to having more. "When we bring out the next version of that stupid satellite phone," he said huskily, as Steve began unbuttoning his shirt, "the one with tablet capabilities that are going to put the Kindle out of business, and it sells millions of copies, I'm going to tell Koening what he can do with all those DoD contracts he's always threatening to take away from me."

Steve didn't point out that said DoD contracts involved work Tony sincerely enjoyed, and that he'd repeatedly heard him refer to the StarkPhone as "boring." He dropped to his knees, letting his hands slide down Tony's body, eliciting a very satisfying choked-off groan when he deliberately brushed them over the front of Tony's trousers, and looked up at Tony with a grin.

"You're lucky I like listening to you talk," he said. "I wonder how long you can keep it up."

Tony raised his eyebrows. "Is that a challenge?"

"What do you think?" Steve reached for Tony's zipper, deliberately taking as long as possible to pull it down and free Tony from the confines of pants and underwear.

"Pepper's always telling me to put together some kind of-" Tony broke off, gasping, then ground out, "some kind of prepared remarks for these meetings."

"Let's hear them then," Steve said. After that, he let Tony do all of the talking; his mouth was otherwise occupied.

Afterwards, the two of them sat side-by-side on the floor, their backs against the wall of boxes, shoulders touching.

"What does it take," Tony said, his breath still coming in slightly ragged gasps, "for you to get out of breath?"

Steve didn't answer, just leaned his head back against the boxes and enjoyed the afterglow. It was a rhetorical question, anyway. After a few minutes, when the energy began to slowly seep back into his limbs, he asked, "What have you told Washington about the mutant situation?"

Tony leaned his weight a little more heavily against Steve, his skin hot against Steve's bare shoulder. "That numerous mutants appear to have spontaneously regained their powers, and that they'll have to ask the X-Men if they want more detailed information. Even if I actually had a clue what was going on, I wouldn't tell them. Not now that I have a choice."

Around them, the contents of one of Steve's boxes of books lay scattered across the floor, the box itself lying on its side a few feet away. The bare wood of the floor was hard, still waiting to be covered by rugs, and the air smelled like new paint beneath the already-fading odor of sex.

The room itself looked like a slightly off-kilter copy of his old room at the Mansion – the layout was identical, and the walls and floor were the same down to the plaster moldings, but the bare walls and lack of furniture other than the bed rendered the room strange, unfamiliar. He'd be sharing it with Tony, now; Tony's old room at the mansion had been the smaller of the two, because he'd been just as likely to spend his time in various expensive apartments or at his company, where according to Pepper, he had sometimes slept on a cot in his work room.

Less than half a year ago, Steve had stood downstairs in the burned-out shell of this building and said goodbye to Tony for good. Having Tony right there next to him, sweaty and messy-haired and smelling like sex and expensive aftershave and hot metal, was a gift he still hadn't completely gotten used to.

"I've been keeping track of the news all day," Tony went on. "Nobody else has a clue what happened, either. If anyone at SHIELD does, they're being careful not to say so within reach of any electronic devices, and not to let anyone on the Helicarrier type the first syllable about it."

"Hank's running some tests on mutant blood chemistry for Beast," Steve offered. Despite the seriousness of the topic at hand, he couldn't keep a smile off his face; Tony worried about any phenomenon he couldn't explain and therefore have at least the illusion of control over, but watching news broadcasts of men and women weeping tears of joy over their returning powers was enough to make Steve willing to accept the mysterious return of the X-gene with only a few reservations.

What had caused it? Why had it only cured some of the mutants affected by M-Day? Was it permanent, or would the "cure" go away as abruptly as it had come? Everyone seemed to have some pet theory – Hank's working hypothesis was that it was magic, and he'd responded to Thor's automatic, "Nay, but what form of magic?" with a snarl of frustration, followed by a blank-faced look of surprise when he'd realized that Thor had actually addressed him directly. Unfortunately, that state of affairs had lasted only a few hours, until the surprise of M-Day's partial reversal had worn off, and Thor had swiftly gone back to pretending that Hank and Tony were not in the room.

Steve was going to have to do something about that, eventually, before the team's performance in the field suffered for it. He wasn't looking forward to it.

But the problems of trying to command a team when half the people on it weren't speaking to one another were nothing next to the miracle of having Thor back; between that and Clint's still-unexplained resurrection at Wanda's hands, Steve was beginning to understand why everyone had kept hugging him and hovering over him when he'd first... come back.

Tony was smiling as well, a small, satisfied curve of his lips that Steve suspected had little to do with their conversation and everything to do with good sex. "Whatever caused it, I'm glad it's happening now instead of two months ago. We'd never have gotten the SHRA repealed."

Steve shook his head slightly, refusing to let his good mood be spoiled by cynical thoughts about what might have been. "I hate politics," he said, without any real venom. "There doesn't always have to be a negative trade-off for good fortune. Sometimes people really do get a second chance."

He scooted slightly closer to Tony, wrapping an arm around his shoulders, and let the feel of Tony's body against his, warm and close and _there_, make his point for him.

Tony leaned his head against Steve's shoulder, sagging downward slightly against the boxes in order to do so, and closed his eyes, the smile still lingering on his lips. "Someday, I'm going to run out of those."

Steve's eyes went automatically to the smooth, unmarked skin of Tony's chest, though he knew that wasn't what Tony was referring to; they were both missing a lifetime's worth of scars, now, and while Steve occasionally missed the small imperfections he'd grown used to in his own appearance – the scar where he'd torn his knee falling off a fire escape as a child, the smallpox vaccination mark on his arm that no one who'd grown up in today's world had – he didn't miss Tony's scars at all. "No," he said, willing it to be true. "You won't."

There was at least a quarter of an hour until Tony had to leave for his meeting; Steve let himself soak in the sound of Tony's breathing, the press of his weight against him, and stared up at the blank, white walls around them, trying to envision them covered in paintings and photographs. All of his old art had vanished somewhere, but he could always draw more, and Jan would probably leap at the chance to look through a few art galleries and help find them something to cover all those barren walls. If he left it to Tony, they would either end up surrounded by images of the Avengers, or live in modernist sterility surrounded by ugly, angular furniture.

The floorboards beneath him were just beginning to become uncomfortably hard when Steve's Avengers communicator, lying out of the way atop a pile of boxes, came to life with a soft ping. Beside him, Tony went stiff, his shoulders jerking.

"It's Dr. Strange," he said, his voice strained. "He says that he has Wanda Maximoff with him. He says she wants to talk to us."

* * *

Strange's Sanctum Sanctorum was still disguised as a Starbucks, despite the fact that he wasn't trying to hide unregistered superheroes from the government anymore. Maybe he liked the privacy, or maybe it just amused him. You could never tell, with Strange.

Tony steeled himself inwardly as he, Steve, and Jan climbed the steps, almost wishing he'd worn his armor. The last time he'd seen Wanda, she had been completely beyond reasoning with, beyond help. And the Avengers had just let Strange hand her over to Magneto, nearly causing the end of the world through their carelessness.

They should have helped her, should have tried harder to get through to her. Should have noticed something was wrong before it was too late; by the end, whatever had been looking out of her eyes hadn't been Wanda anymore. The real Wanda, the woman Tony had been on a team with for years, would never have attempted to destroy an entire race of people.

Carol had insisted that it might be a trick, that they had no way of knowing whether or not Wanda was actually sane again, or had used her incredibly powerful chaos magic to influence Strange into _thinking _she was. She'd insisted on coming with them, as had Clint, but both of them were hanging back, following slowly behind the others as if they'd rather be anywhere else.

Steve, of course, was ready to believe that Wanda really was back, that Strange had somehow managed to find her and, miraculously, heal her. If he hadn't, he would do what he had to do, just as Tony would, but it would hurt him to have to treat Wanda as an enemy once more. All of them had spent far too much time fighting old friends.

Sooner or later, though, they were going to run out of miracles and good luck.

Tony resisted the urge to check the latches on his briefcase and reached for the door knocker.

The door swung inward before his fingers had even touched the polished brass, to reveal Strange, standing several steps back from the entrance. The narrow, Victorian hallway was dark, wreathing Strange in dramatic shadows; Tony suspected it was intentional.

"There are fewer of you than I expected," Strange said.

"We decided that the entire team would be a little too intimidating," Jan said, just as Clint said,

"Where is she? Is she all right? Does she know who she is again?"

Strange nodded, stepping aside and gesturing for them to enter the house. "Wanda has recovered her memories from before her possession by Chthon. She has no recollection of most of what occurred while she was under his control. She was unsure whether she ought to contact you, but there are things you need to know."

"She was possessed?" Steve's eyebrows shot up, and then his jaw tightened. "For how long?"

_How long did we manage not to notice it_, he meant.

Carol was still standing in the doorway, her arms folded across her chest. Tony put a hand on her arm, nudging her forward, and the door swung closed behind them, appearing to move of its own initiative.

As it fell shut, the string of emails from Pepper that Tony was mentally glancing over with a corner of his attention dissolved into static, as did the newsfeed full of reports on the mutant situation. He stiffened, and reached automatically for the armor, relaxing again when he was able to access it easily. Jan's cell phone was still detectible, too, searching futilely for a signal.

Every electronic signal coming from outside the house had been cut off.

"I wasn't able to determine that," Strange said, answering Steve's question. He grimaced slightly, clearly not pleased to have to admit to ignorance about something. "Wanda herself is unsure when he began influencing her."

"It's like that," Tony said. He was gripping the handle of his briefcase hard enough that his fingers were starting to hurt, he realized. He made himself loosen his grasp, and tried one more time to access one of the cut-off datafeeds. Once again, no luck. "You can't tell, afterwards, how much of it was the mind control and how much was you." Or at least, he hadn't been able to tell, when Immortus had been influencing him. When the Extremis had been hacked, his memory had been wiped after every instance of mind-control, leaving him with large blocks of missing time, and Ultron's mind-control had worked the same way. But with Immortus...

He remembered far too much of that.

"I could tell," Carol said, her voice flat. "Afterwards, anyway. Even when it was happening, I knew something was wrong. I just couldn't do anything about it."

Steve was still frowning, and Tony wasn't sure if the stiff set of his shoulders was due to Wanda's situation, or the reminder of what Marcus had done to Carol, when he'd used mind-control to seduce her into leaving the team and traveling to another dimension with him. And to make her think she'd fallen in love with him.

"How did she break free?" Steve asked.

"When she reached New York, proximity to the Spear of Loki in Hell's Kitchen disrupted Chthon's control over her. She came to me, and I was able to place magical shields on her to prevent him from reasserting control." Strange stopped in front of a heavy, wooden door, pushing it open with one hand and waving them inside with the other. "I believe I will let Miss Maximoff explain the rest."

Wanda was standing at the far end of Strange's study, her back to the door, staring out the huge, round window that dominated the room. Wong was standing next to her, the two of them deep in conversation.

"—not entirely sure how to accomplish that," he was saying. "Stephen's always been able to ignore those little details. You weren't officially declared dead, and the police and SHIELD didn't really understand what happened in the first place, so there have been no legal charges, so your assets should still be in your name." He nodded at the doorway, and added, gently, "Your teammates are here."

Wanda turned, her face expressionless. She was wearing a conservative skirt and blouse in subdued colors, and her face looked drawn and pale with exhaustion. She straightened her shoulders and faced them unflinchingly. "Clint," she said. "Steve, Carol. I'm... I'm glad you came. All of you." Her voice wavered on the last word, but her face and posture didn't change.

The last time Tony had seen her, she had been hovering in mid-air, surrounded by the hectic red light of chaos magic. Now she looked... normal. For months he'd been inwardly dreading the necessity of having to deal with her one day, amnesia and supposedly vanished powers or not, and coming face to face with her now felt strangely anti-climatic. No potentially world-destroying showdown, no lives at risk, no need to make any impossible choices.

"Wanda," Clint blurted out. "You remember me now. I mean, you look... are you okay?"

She looked away, one hand crumpling the fabric of her skirt. There was something dark on the back of it, but Tony wasn't close enough to make out the details. "I'm... I will be. I hope."

"Scarlet Witch," Steve cut in, voice controlled. It was his Captain America, I-am-in-charge-here voice, despite the fact that none of them were in costume. "It's good to see you yourself again."

There was a long moment of silence. Jan smiled tentatively, Clint looked at the floor, and Carol glowered at Wanda and everyone else, pointedly silent. Tony stood there feeling awkward, watching Steve and Wanda try to smile at one another, and struggled to think of something to say. _'I'm sorry we never noticed that you were under mind-control'_, maybe, or _'I'm sorry we didn't help you when you needed it.'_ Both seemed trite.

There were some things that apologies never seemed to work for.

Then Wanda's stiff, tremulous smile widened into a real one, and her eyes started to shine with what looked suspiciously like unshed tears. "I heard that you were dead," she said. "I'm so glad you're back. I wish I'd been here to help, when it happened."

Tony felt a sudden surge of relief that she hadn't been, that he'd been spared fighting and trying to imprison at least one of his old teammates, and then instantly felt guilty. She hadn't been there during Registration because she'd been off in Transia with Chthon doing God only knew what with her mind and body.

Chthon could have done anything to her, during the long year when Tony had preferred to ignore her existence because he didn't want to deal with it. Used her to kill, warping her powers and will into a weapon the way he had on M-Day. Influenced her thoughts, planted suggestions and commands in her brain...

They wouldn't be able to trust her, anymore. She wouldn't be able to trust herself.

Tony knew that feeling intimately, had known it long before Registration had forced him to sell out. It was part of why he'd been willing to try and work with HUSAC and Superhuman Registration in the first place, why he'd gone along with Dickstein and Koening and Gyrich and all the others, and not just because Koening and Dickstein had used the things he'd done when the Extremis had been hacked to blackmail him.

When superheroes couldn't trust themselves, it was impossible to expect the public to trust them, especially after disasters like Stamford. Proving they were safe, non-threatening, willing to follow the rules... had not been a very good solution, but it had been better than proving everyone's fears right would have been. Had been.

He'd come so close to falling off the wagon during the Registration fight, closer than anyone knew. Part of him had wanted to – it would have been so much easier to just stop fighting, and he'd already thrown away nearly every good thing he'd once had. It was different now. Now he had a lot more to lose. In some ways, that made it harder.

Steve rubbed at the back of his neck, the motion awkward and jerky. "I'm glad to be back," he said. "But we have some questions we need to ask you and Dr. Strange."

"Starting with how we can be sure Chthon's influence is truly gone." The words felt stiff in Tony's mouth, accusatory. The last thing Wanda probably needed right now was more blame, not when she knew very well what Chthon had used her to do, and what it had cost them all – Vision, Scott Lang, Clint, until his unexplained return, very nearly the team itself – but it had to be said.

Wanda took a few steps closer to the rest of them and held up her hands, palms facing inwards. The dark markings Tony had noticed earlier were tattoos, circular designs that looked like the circles magic users like Doom sometimes used to summon demons and other entities bent on destroying the world. Black, angular writing wrapped around the edge and wove through the design, in a script Tony didn't recognize, though he thought he saw a few alchemical symbols worked into it at strategic points.

"These seal me away from Chthon's power. As long as I wear them, he can't touch me unless I break the barrier between us myself."

"Which we're supposed to just trust you not to do?" Carol's voice was acid. "The way Vision trusted you? The way She-Hulk and Tony did? And Clint?"

Wanda shook her head, rubbing at the tattoo on her left hand. "No. You don't have to trust me. I'm not asking to come back to the team. Not now. Not after-" she stopped, swallowing, and continued. "I know I can't apologize or go back. I wanted to warn you."

So that they would be prepared if she lost control again, Tony thought. It was what he would have done, what Steve had refused to let him do after the disaster with the fear toxin last month.

The Wanda spoke again, and proved his assessment completely wrong. "Chthon is trying to free himself from his prison and return to this dimension. That's why he sent me here."

It was probably a sign of how bad the past year had been that Tony didn't even feel surprise. Of course Wanda's return to New York was part of a demonic plot. Nothing good came without strings attached.

He heard Steve swear, so quietly that only Tony, standing right next to him, would be able to hear it, and revised the thought. Almost nothing good came without strings.

"To do what?" Jan asked, taking a step forward. Her chin was raised, and her arms folded casually across her chest, but she looked at ease, in control, her calm even more impressive against the backdrop of Carol's sullen anger and Clint's obvious unease.

He wasn't even looking at Wanda, as if the mere sight of her was painful. Maybe it was, after what had happened between them on Mount Wundagore.

"To remake the earth in his own image, preferably killing or enslaving everyone on it in the process." Wong said the words with faint disgust, as if he'd encountered entities like Chthon far too many times to be impressed by them any longer. "Unfortunately, he's powerful enough to do it."

"Considering the amount of influence he's able to exert on the world while still imprisoned..." Strange let the sentence trail off, the pause lingering ominously. "He intended to use Wanda to obtain the chaos power stored within Baldur's Bane, which would increase the powers at his disposal just enough for him to breach the walls of his prison. Once free, he would be undefeatable, especially with Loki's power added to his own."

Tony narrowed his eyes. "You said you'd sealed the spear away."

"From Doom and other sorcerers who seek its power for selfish ends." Strange gestured at Wanda, as if the answer ought to have been obvious. For him, it probably was. "Wanda was seeking it for Chthon's ends, not her own."

"There's always a loophole," Clint said, bitterly. "I hate demons."

"So do I," Tony muttered.

"So you see," Wanda was saying, her voice measured and careful, "I can't leave until Chthon has been stopped. And I can't fight him alone, not without using his own power to strengthen mine. And if I do that, he'll have me again. I can understand if you don't want to help me, but you needed to know-"

"Of course we'll help," Steve said firmly, as if the Avengers had already discussed the situation and come to a unanimous conclusion.

Wanda's face crumpled with relief for a moment, and then she looked away. "Thank you," she said quietly.

Jan put a hand on her arm. "Everything you've done – everything Chthon made you do – can be dealt with later. This is more important."

"Well, obviously, but..." Carol shook her head sharply, then turned to Strange. "Why can't you do it?" she asked bluntly.

Strange spread his hands. "Even the power of the Sorcerer Supreme pales beside that of an elder god. I, too, would not be able to accomplish the task alone. I have faced Chthon before, but never at his full power."

She narrowed her eyes. "I thought you were infallible and nearly omnipotent."

"Only nearly. Sorry to have disappointed you."

"I agree with Jan," Clint said quickly. "We can talk about everything else later."

Steve caught Tony's gaze, eyebrows raised in a silent question.

"All for one, and one for all," Tony agreed. He meant for it to sound light, upbeat, but the words came out sounding grim.

Good intentions and a common enemy had gone a little way toward repairing the shattered remnants of their team before, but that had been as much luck as anything else, Steve granting forgiveness to Tony almost completely unearned, and the rest of the superhero community grudgingly following his lead. Even now, the breach still hadn't completely healed, something Thor's pointed absence from today's visit made all too obvious. Tony had come, so of course, Thor hadn't.

They might not be able to repair things this time, not when they had wronged Wanda far more deeply than anyone in the superhero community had ever wronged Tony or Hank during the Registration fight – they'd been acting of their own free will. Even if the entire team and the superhero community at large were prepared to forgive her, something he'd bet money most of the world's mutant population was never going to do, she might not be able to forgive them.

And Chthon would be able to take advantage of that.

* * *

"She's been sane for what, two days?" Sam shook his head, frowning. "What if Chthon planted some kind of trigger, made her a sleeper agent? She could be following his orders without even realizing it."

"Exactly." Hank pointed a finger at Sam. "We need her where we can keep an eye on her."

"That's not actually what I was saying." On Sam's shoulder, Redwing cocked his head and eyed Hank's finger threateningly.

Jan had never been able to bring herself to like birds. They were pretty, yes, but their cold reptilian eyes and scaly feet had been off-putting even before the first three times she'd almost been eaten by one. Sam's pet was no exception – he looked at her as if he knew that she could shrink down to the size of something edible and was merely waiting until Sam turned his back during a fight in order to grab a crunchy, Wasp-shaped snack.

She had clearly been spending too much time around Hank lately, if she was starting to come up with her own paranoid worries; with matters on the team as they stood, Hank was spending a lot of time hiding in the Tower's lab, and it was never good when Hank spent days in a lab completely unsupervised. He forgot to shower, for one thing.

"We already agreed to help Wanda," Jan reminded everyone, resisting the impulse to get up and pace. She sacrificed some of her authority as chairwoman when she shrank down to six inches tall and paced back and forth across the table, but it always helped her think. "Stopping Chthon from breaking free is-"

"You mean Cap agreed to help her," Carol interrupted.

"He's right." Tony's metal faceplate was expressionless, as always, but even through the helmet's voice filters, he sounded stubbornly uncompromising. "We owe her. She wouldn't have ended up in this situation at all if we'd noticed what was going on sooner."

"Well, no, but..." Hank waved a hand, visibly struggling for words. "She nearly destroyed the world. She's incredibly powerful. Incredibly powerful and unstable, and that means she's incredibly dangerous. She killed Scott. And Vision. Maybe she didn't mean to, but they're still dead."

Dead like Steve had been. Dead like Bill Foster. The words hung in the air, no one needing to say them. Hank, she knew, could hear them anyway; he dropped his gaze to the tabletop, and fell silent.

Steve folded his arms across his chest, his jaw tilting at a familiar angle. "If Strange is right, that wasn't actually her. And I don't see any reason why we should doubt him."

Thor had been silent throughout the meeting – the argument, really – and when he spoke, it was almost startling. "If the Scarlet Witch was truly forced to do these terrible deeds against her will, then it would be wrong of us to blame her for them."

He had no problem blaming Hank and Tony for cloning him without his knowledge, Jan thought, or for the destruction said clone had caused, despite the fact that neither of them had been acting of their own free will, either. She couldn't _blame_ him – it had been a horrible violation, and the cost... Dickstein's committee had forced Hank's hands, but assigning the blame where it was due still wasn't going to bring Bill back.

She'd left Hank and been prepared to leave the pro-registration side and her life as a superhero after Bill Foster's death, but she also knew how much Hank regretted it, and couldn't help feeling defensive of him. She didn't want to be angry at Thor, not when just seeing him sitting across the table from her still made her want to hug him in thanks that he was alive. He was right. What Hank had done had been terrible. Still...

How did Steve manage to be completely sympathetic to both Thor and Tony, to avoid obviously picking a side? He was a better person, a better leader, than she was – Jan could never manage that degree of impartiality where Hank was concerned. Even when he'd hurt her, leaving him had been almost as difficult as staying would have been.

Thor wasn't the one who had to try and get Hank out of bed in the morning. Steve either.

Clint, surprisingly, nodded. "The big guy's right," he said. "If she was possessed, it's not her fault. Nothing she did was her fault."

"She still did it," Carol snapped, glaring at him. "How can you defend her, after what she did to you? She could do it again at any time, the moment she uses enough magic to fry Strange's seals and lets Chthon back into her head."

Clint looked away, his hands still on the table-top.

"It wouldn't even have to be her fault," Sam repeated. "Like I said, he could have planted suggestions in her head."

Steve sighed. "If we kicked everyone off the team who might potentially have had a supervillain planting suggestions in their head, the only people left at this table would be Jan and Thor."

"Nay, the Enchantress hypnotized me once."

"All right, just Jan, then."

"Not after last month," Jan countered. "We all know there are no guarantees in this business. If Chthon truly is on the verge of breaking free, arguing about whether or not we can trust Wanda's information is a waste of time. Strange has already vouched for her, and if we can't trust his word, then we might as well throw our hands up and give up now."

"So we're just supposed to trust her not to use too much magic and burn through the seals?" Carol's voice dripped with scorn. Jan was tempted to point out that half the former anti-Registration superheroes had been equally unwilling to trust _Carol_, but that would have been petty, and wouldn't accomplish anything.

"Yes," she said. "Yes, we're supposed to trust her. The way we trust Hank to take his medication, and Tony not to start drinking again, or erase our checking accounts with the Extremis just because he can, or Steve not to kill somebody practicing unarmed combat moves. Or Sam and Clint not to..." she trailed off, unable to think of anything potentially threatening about Clint, or any way Sam could possibly misuse the ability to talk to birds.

Hank flushed, his face tightening with a familiar look of discomfort. She could almost hear him saying, _'Don't embarrass me in public, Jan,'_ in tones that would once have been an annoyed snarl and now were usually just resigned, but there were times when they had to stop tiptoeing around the truth. And the truth was that all of them had the potential to be incredibly dangerous under the wrong circumstances. It wasn't as if having to keep a watchful eye on a teammate was a new concept.

"I could do much better than just erase your checking accounts," Tony said, after a long moment of silence.

"This meeting is not a place for levity," Thor said stiffly, neither looking at Tony nor directly addressing him. "Trust must be earned, and is all too easily betrayed. But by all we have heard, the Scarlet Witch is, methinks, innocent of any such betrayal. And Chthon is a terrible enemy; none of the gods of Asgard have powers to equal his. My vote is that we accept her help."

Steve nodded. "Mine as well." No surprise there; he hadn't hesitated for so much as a moment at Strange's Sanctum Sanctorum before offering his – their – help.

"I agree with Cap-" Tony started.

"Oh, _there's_ a surprise," Carol muttered. "I vote no."

She probably ought to vote no as well, Jan knew. Keeping a watchful eye on a teammate, trusting them to do the right thing, to use their powers wisely, was something they all did every day, but after a disaster as complete as Wanda's possession-driven breakdown, it would be foolish to just let her walk back onto the team without proving herself. She had kicked Hank off the team for a reason, all those years ago, and it hadn't been because he'd given her a black eye – he'd come within inches of getting the rest of them killed. They hadn't been able to trust his judgment, any more than they'd been able to trust Tony's judgment when he'd been drinking, though he'd thankfully taken himself off the team of his own volition before Jan or Steve had had to do it for him. Carol, too, had needed to be stricken from the Avengers roster when she'd been drinking, and it had taken more than simply her insistence that she was fine, afterwards, for Steve to agree to let her back on.

She ought to vote no. But the fact remained that Chthon was too powerful for them to face without Wanda's magic at their disposal. Strange had admitted that touching the spear and accessing its power was beyond him, that channeling pure chaos power would drive almost any magic user other than Wanda insane. "We need her," she said. "I vote yes. But not as an Avenger. Not until we can be sure she's really okay."

It had nothing to do with Hank and Tony, she told herself. She wasn't rushing to forgive Wanda because she felt obligated to give the other woman a second chance after being so quick to come back to the pro-Registration side despite Bill's death, despite how uneasy HUSAC's actions and the Fifty State Initiative had made her.

Hank cleared his throat. "I say yes, too. We need her where we can stop her, if something goes wrong."

"Falcon?" Steve asked.

Sam shook his head. "I vote no. There's too much we can't be sure of, especially this soon."

"Hawkeye?"

Clint shrugged one shoulder, his eyes on the table top. "I don't know. I- Can I abstain?"

Jan frowned. Clint's vote wasn't the deciding factor at this point, not with five votes for and two against, but she had expected him to have strong feelings one way or the other. He had known Wanda longer than any of them except Steve, and he had been the one to find her in Transia. He was the one she had killed, then raised from the dead.

And it wasn't like Clint not to have an opinion on a decision as important as this, usually a loud opinion.

"Are you sure?" Steve asked Clint, his eyebrows raised in surprise. "If anyone has the right to object to working with her, it's-"

"I'm sure," Clint interrupted. "She brought me back from the dead. And then I-" he broke off, looking uncomfortable. "I don't know. I don't think I can make a rational decision here."

"Who gets to bring her in here to hear the verdict?" Hank asked.

"No one." Tony held up one gauntleted hand. "You remember what it's like. She had no choice in any of this, and we're not going to haul her up in front of all eight of us to make her listen to us pass judgment on her. Making her wait in the hall is bad enough." He turned to Steve, the motion making light glint off his polished faceplate. "Send somebody out there to tell her what our decision is."

"That's... a good idea actually." Steve frowned slightly, his mask crinkling over his eyebrows. "Is that really what it's like?"

Carol sighed, pushing her hair out of her face with one hand. "No," she said. "Tony's actually downplaying how nerve-wracking having everyone sit in judgment of you is."

Steve rubbed his hands together, glancing at the door, then stood. "I'll tell her, then. We can discuss how we're going to make this work later. And it is going to work," he added, casting a stern look over the entire table.

Jan watched him stride toward the door, resisting the impulse to rub at her temples. Steve clung fondly to the belief that he could make things turn out the way he wanted them to by sheer force of will. It was endearing, most of the time, but sometimes...

Problems didn't go away just because you wanted them to. Eventually, you always had to accept that they were there, and deal with them.


	4. Chapter 4

**Chapter Four**

The massive, Victorian pseudo-Gothic façade of St. Margaret's Cathedral was wreathed in shadows, the soot-smudged stone seeming to draw the darkness toward itself. The floodlight that usually illuminated its five-story high steeple and the giant cross that topped it had burned out, leaving the upper reaches of the building in shadow. The two stressed-looking trees that grew inside cages of iron railing on either side of the building had lost almost all of their leaves; a handful of them drifted lifelessly across the sidewalk, the wind sending them scraping dryly over the cracked concrete.

From his position on the third-story window ledge of an apartment building across the street from it, Strange could sense the aura of malice that hung around the cathedral. It was thick, suffocating. Hungry.

"It sounds stupid, I know," Matt Murdock's voice was low, rough, the slightly nasal sound of working class New York Irish in it thick enough to cut with a knife. He had only the barest trace of accent in court, voice smoother and at least half an octave lighter – Strange had heard him speak when out of costume, and it was almost like listening to a completely different person. He would have applauded it as an effective trick to keep Daredevil's voice unrecognizable to people who knew him as Matt Murdock, but he suspected that Matt didn't even know he was doing it.

"If I thought your worries were foolish, I would not be here," Strange said. "You're not imagining things; the energy fields around the cathedral have shifted. Dark magic has been used here, and a great deal of it."

"It just..." Matt shook his head. The dull red leather of his mask obscured most of his face, but his body language conveyed unease – he was crouched low on the edge of the ledge, not bothering to look up at Strange as he spoke. Matt generally made an effort to face people when he spoke to them. "It feels wrong, somehow. Different. And I've been having these dreams. That there's something in there. Something that wants to get out."

"Well then," Strange said, "let us go down and investigate your church. There very well may be something inside trying to get out." He most fervently hoped not, given that Chthon was dangerous enough anywhere, and likely to be even more dangerous in such close proximity to Baldur's Bane, especially inside a church. The barriers between dimensions were naturally thin inside sacred places, the more so the older said sacred location was. St. Margaret's had been built nearly a decade before the Civil War.

Strange took a step forward and allowed the Cloak of Levitation to float him gently down to the street below. Behind him, Daredevil climbed down the building façade like a cat-burglar, dropping the final ten feet in an acrobatic jump that would have done an Olympic gymnast proud.

The oppressive atmosphere worsened as Strange drew closer to the cathedral. When he laid his hand on the door, the heavy wood and metal seemed to hum, the mystical vibrations sending a dull ache through damaged nerves and poorly knit bones.

His own protective spells were layered thickly around the nave of the cathedral. Had he not been the Sorcerer Supreme, a novice's uncertainty over a decade behind him, their familiarity would have been reassuring.

The inside of the cathedral was dark, illuminated only by the candles on the high altar, and by the flickering red glow of a dozen or so tiny votive candles left burning below the image of the Blessed Virgin. A middle-aged white man in a green windbreaker was praying at one of the stations of the cross; he didn't look up when they entered, Strange's magic subtly clouding his perceptions and hiding the two of them from his sight.

Other than him, Strange and Matt were alone in the cathedral.

So much the better. An audience would be a hindrance, diverting his attention from the task at hand with the need to keep a dozen pairs of unwanted eyes from witnessing his presence.

"There have been three mugging on this block in the past week, and two fights," Matt said softly, his voice pitched low enough that even without Strange's power masking it, the man praying a few dozen feet away wouldn't have heard. "This isn't exactly a brilliant neighborhood, but even for here, that's unusual. One of the parishioners actually threw a punch at me after mass this Sunday. People don't do that when I'm out of costume. Nobody wants to hit the blind guy."

Strange didn't answer. He focused his senses, opening his mind and reaching out through the Eye of Agamotto to see the unseen reality that surrounded them.

The high altar glowed with power to his otherworldly senses, the chaos energy that saturated the spear emanating up through the stones that covered it. That much had not changed since the last time he had stood here and gazed upon this place.

What _had_ changed was the thin spot in the fabric of reality located just beyond the polished brass altar rail, a blurred space in the air at what would have been head height for a short man – or for a woman of average height. Tendrils of chaos energy writhed invisibly around it, perceptible only to those who had eyes to see, and knew where and how to look.

The energy was different in nature from the hot, orange-yellow-white power of the spear, moving in slow, sullen coils that pulsated with the unhealthy red heat of an infected wound. In the spaces between them, Strange could glimpse a cold, black absence of light, from which emanated unfelt vibrations on the same bone-hurting frequency as the power that had hummed through the cathedral door.

Matt's boots were silent on the stone floor as he came to stand beside Strange, the soles made of soft leather, or something else designed to let him move with barely a sound. "Do you... hear something?" he asked quietly. His chin was tilted up, his head cocked slightly to the left, as if he were trying to pinpoint the source of a sound. "Something whispering?" Strange began to say no, his attention still on the coil of energy in front of him, when he heard it, a faint susurrus of sound just within the threshold of audibility. As soon as he became aware of it, the volume increased, until it sounded as if someone – or something – was whispering in his ear, the words too garbled to make out.

"Try to ignore it, if you can," he advised Matt. "The less contact you have with Chthon, the better."

"In a church? I thought he was a demon."

Strange shook his head. "He is a primordial chaos entity, eons older than Christianity, and both unbound by and uncaring of its rules."

Matt nodded, and shifted his weight uneasily from one foot to the other, obviously wanting to pace. He talked with his hands when he was out of costume, gestures broader the more agitated he was, and Strange had recognized the signs of a person who didn't like sitting still, who enjoyed grandstanding, who liked to feel in control of his environment. He could guess from experience how long it had probably taken for the other man to teach himself how to stay perfectly still and silent, which he could do eerily well. Not at the moment, though. He had been visibly nervous from the moment they had walked through the front doors.

No doubt he could feel the same aura of evil in the air that Strange could sense; bound to the church as he was, by blood and oaths, he would sense any danger that threatened within these walls.

To ordinary eyes, the inside of the cathedral must have looked entirely normal, the stone wall and polished wooden pews glowing warmly in the dim light. The tiny brass number plates that marked each pew gleamed brightly, and the heavy gold embroidery on the green altar cloth blazed in the candlelight. Chthon's presence did not exist on the physical plane – it would not tarnish the brass candlestick holders or stain the altar screen or heavy wooden crucifix.

The damage his taint would do would be invisible, and far more insidious.

Strange marshaled his thoughts, seeking the degree of mental clarity that would be necessary for a working powerful enough to seal the incipient breach between realities and drive the fraction of Chthon's essence trapped before the high altar back where it belonged. Chthon was likely using the destabilization of magical energies caused by the spear to keep a toe-hold in this world, relying on the thinness of the dimensional barriers here to make it possible.

His influence could only be felt in the immediate area of the church, and with the wards still in place around the building – both the ones Strange had erected, and the ancient, Asgardian protections that had lain heavy on the spear for millennia – leaving the confines of the sanctuary would require more power than Chthon, still trapped largely in the other realm, currently possessed.

To remove the spear from its hiding place and fully access its powers, he would need to possess a human host, and with Wanda sealed away from him, few humans were left who would be suitable for such a task. Even fewer of those would be likely to walk into St. Margaret's.

Strange adjusted the sleeves of his robe, then raised his hands to chest height, gradually ceasing to become aware of the smell of candle smoke and ghost of old incense, of the sound of Daredevil's breathing and the tiny creaks of his leather costume as he shifted, of the weight of the Eye on his chest and the flutter of the Cape of Levitation against his legs, until all that remained was the reality his supernatural senses showed him.

Chthon had only a toehold here, but given time, given the weight of human minds and souls that would press into this church every Sunday and Wednesday to worship, unprotected and vulnerable to his influence, his power would grow, feeding not on their faith, but on their darker emotions – anger, fear, anxiety, despair, all the chaotic and disordered states of the human mind.

"I summon the powers of the Vishanti!" he began, reaching out for the power that lay always waiting, ready for the adept to call upon it. In many spells, the words were, strictly speaking, unnecessary – the true magic was done by the exertion of one's will, with spells and gestures serving merely as a focus for the mind – but when drawing upon the great powers, they were vital. Spoken aloud, an invocation served as both supplication and invitation, addressed to forces who would only grant their aid when the proper forms were observed, or whose touch, if the forms were not observed, could be immensely dangerous.

"In the name of the All-Seeing Agamotto, all thy powers I summon." The magic came in a rush, like light flooding into a room when curtains were pulled back, until he could feel it thrumming within and around him, so vast that the sweetness of wielding it came near the edge of pain.

He focused his will upon the weak spot in reality, envisioning the thick coils of Chthon's power being driven back the through too-permeable barrier, like a reversed form of cellular osmosis. "Let all the Hosts of Hoggoth send you back to the netherworld from whence you came!" he cried, and set the force of his will and magic – both his own, and that lent by the Vishanti, for which he served merely as the conduit – against the cold, heavy weight of Chthon's presence.

It was as if he tried to throw himself against a brick wall. Chthon's snarl of rage rang through his head, and the whispering rose to an eerie almost-scream that blocked out all other sound.

The coils of magical energy were heavy, slick, and almost impossible to shift, slipping out of his grasp whenever he attempted to take hold of them. Strange shaped his fingers into a sequence of complex magical seals, envisioning the currents of power moving with his gestures like a puppet on strings. "Begone!" He forced the word out through the strain and effort, trying to imbue it with all the power and authority of the Sorcerer Supreme, of all the masters and adepts who had held the title before him. The Eye burned against his chest, its heat palpable even through his tunic.

He could feel sweat prickling against his skin, along his ribs and back, could smell the faintest hint of sulfur cutting sharply through the must of candles and incense and old stone as Chthon's power lashed at him. It battered at his shields, against the edges of his mind, full of malicious intent.

"Begone," he hissed, through gritted teeth, ignoring the assault. "I command you!"

_You cannot compel me, mage_. Chthon's hollow, whispery voice stabbed at his brain, the syllables like the crackling of fire, or the crunching of tiny, dried bones. _This place is of Chthon, now. I have claimed it for my own, and all that lies within it._

There was a wordless shout from Matt, and Strange half-turned to look back at him just as the man who had been praying so quietly in the side chapel slammed into him.

He felt a hard blow against his side, and something cold slid between two of his lower ribs, and then Matt was on the man, ripping him away from Strange and landing three hard, effective blows with hand, elbow, and foot.

The man crumpled to the floor, his green windbreaker rustling against the stone.

With a torrent of magic pouring through him, Strange did not feel the pain of the wound in his side, but when he glanced down, the silver handle of a leatherman was standing incongruously out from his side, surrounded by a dark patch of blood.

As soon as he saw the way the fabric of his tunic clung wetly to his skin, he could feel the warmth of the blood soaking into it, but the knife itself might as well have been stuck into someone else entirely.

"You think such petty weapons can disable the Sorcerer Supreme?" he asked, and raised his hands once more, gathering the power he had never lost hold of into them and preparing to launch into another spell.

_I will be free,_ Chthon howled. _No interfering mortal gatekeeper shall stop me._

Matt grabbed at him abruptly, his hands pulling on Strange's arms and disrupting the building forces of the spell. "You're bleeding. Hold still and let me see where you're hurt." He began patting down Strange's arms, his torso, ignoring his attempt to pull away – and then his hands brushed against the knife handle.

The pain in his side was sudden and blinding; Strange grabbed for the altar rail, fighting the urge to curl around the pain, his concentration shattered for one brief, fatal moment.

Chthon's will slammed against his cracking shields like a wall of water pounding against a crumbling dam, forcing its way through the cracks and _into_ him – and Strange knew, with an instant's cold clarity, that if his shields failed, if he did not succeed in driving the chaos entity back, out of his mind, then Chthon would possess him utterly, make of him a puppet the way he had the Scarlet Witch.

He reached out wildly for more power, all of his careful training and discipline deserting him, and it was there, waiting hot and orange-gold as fire just beyond his reach.

He stretched out his free hand toward it, seizing at it—

The pain was incredible, like grabbing hold of a live wire, worse than the knife in his side by an entire order of magnitude. Raw chaos magic filled him, corrosive and violent and _burning_, too immense and wild for control. He flung it at Chthon blindly, an exercise of magical brute force, but even as the chaos entity was expelled from his mind, the spear's power was burning through him from the inside out. "Hoary fucking hosts," he gasped. "I call—upon—"

His knees hit the floor hard. Matt was saying something, trying to pull the writhing Cloak of Levitation out of the way so that he could touch Strange's side again. "Leave the knife where it is," Strange snapped at him, as he struggled to release the power that was flaying his soul. Dark magic, even the powers of Dormammu and Satannish, was still rooted in a kind of order, still obeyed commands. This magic was unstable, dangerous; he had to release it, had to stop drawing on it before it destroyed him.

He managed to wrench himself away from the flow of chaos magic just as his vision began to go dark around the edges. The mocking sound of Chthon's laughter followed him down into darkness.

* * *

The Night Nurse's clinic reminded Wanda of a high tech version of the MASH unit from that old TV show – there were cots instead of hospital beds in some of the rooms, and the operating table was built to be easily disassembled and moved when necessary. All the equipment looked temporary, portable.

"And you are?" the Night Nurse asked coolly, raising an eyebrow at Wanda. She was in her late thirties, dark-haired and attractive in a severe-featured way, and the whimsical old fashioned nurse's uniform sat oddly on her, like a well-made Halloween costume. Wanda suspected that she would have looked more at home in surgical scrubs.

"She's one of Stephen's students," Wong said; he didn't look at the woman while he spoke, his gaze clearly on the camp bed where Strange lay, an IV line in one elbow and bandages wrapped around his torso and both his hands. "She's staying with us at the moment." He turned his head slightly, his attention refocusing on the Night Nurse, and added, "You didn't give me much information over the phone. What happened?"

The Night Nurse shook her head. "I don't know. Daredevil's account of the situation isn't very detailed. I was hoping you could tell me what's wrong with him. That astral projection form of his ought to be hovering over in the corner telling me how to do my job, but instead he's just lying there."

"He wasn't stabbed that badly," Daredevil halted his nervous pacing of the room to proteSt. "I can tell when someone's punctured a lung; their breathing changes, and you can hear the fluid in their-"

"How was he stabbed in the first place?" Wanda interrupted. "He was going with you to make sure Chthon hadn't tampered with the magical protections at St. Margaret's."

Daredevil looked away, and Wanda felt an odd sense of relief to have the opaque red plastic of his mask's eyeholes leave her. There was something unnerving about how steadily and intently he _watched_people, his head cocked slightly to one side like he was committing every move they made to memory. "There was a man praying in the chapel there. He just lost it, went completely crazy and attacked us. I didn't," he hesitated. "I didn't hear him coming. There was this whispering, drowning everything out, like it was coming from everywhere at once."

"Or inside your own head," Wanda said, remembering the incessant whispering that had battered at the edges of her mind as she'd fled from the church.

"Strange heard it, too," Daredevil protested defensively.

"I'm sure he did," Wong said, his eyes going to Strange again. Strange looked older, lying so still, all the grandiose hand gestures and cool superiority absent.

She'd gone to him for protection, expecting him to wave a hand and solve all her problems, secure in the knowledge that the Sorcerer Supreme was the one person she wouldn't endanger with her presence. She should have known better.

"Chthon can do that," she said, to Daredevil. "It's one of his tricks. Sometimes he'll sound like someone you know."

The Night Nurse eyed Daredevil appraisingly. "I'll check you out when I'm done with Stephen and with those idiots from the bank robbery in room three," she said. "Supervillains," she added. "They always wait until the last minute to come in, and then it just makes my job harder. It took me ages to get the internal bleeding stabilized. Could you tell your friend Rand to hit people a little less forcefully?"

Daredevil shrugged one shoulder. "You'll have to take that up with Iron Fist. If those are the bank robbers I think you're talking about, I think he took objection to them trying to use some kind of poison gas on Luke."

The Night Nurse snorted. "A half hour with an oxygen mask and Cage was fine. Fortunately. I don't know what I'd do if it were ever necessary to operate on him." Then, to Wong, "I stitched and bandaged Stephen's side and treated the burns on his fingers. He can complain about my handiwork when he wakes up."

"I'm sure he wouldn't be that rude," Wong said, with the sound of a man who knew he was offering an empty promise. He brushed one finger gently across the back of Strange's bandaged left hand. "What was he touching, when he did this? Sometimes, if something's hot-"

"He doesn't always notice?" The Night Nurse finished. "I know. They aren't normal burns. It looks almost as if he did it to himself by grabbing some kind of electric wire."

"Whatever spell he was doing blew up in his face." Wanda hadn't meant to speak, and didn't fully realize that she had until everyone in the cramped little room was staring at her.

"He was going to cast Chthon back out of the cathedral," Daredevil said, frowning. "He told him to go back to 'the place from whence he came'. That was when Mr. Gillis tried to stab him."

"Luckily for our sorcerer friend, the knife was single-edged, and only a few inches long, and he managed to miss all the vital organs." The Night Nurse's fingers were taut around the edge of the clipboard she was holding, white surgical gloves stretched tightly over her knuckles. "He ought to be waking up shortly."

Wong shook his head. "Not necessarily. When a spell backfires upon the caster, the effects can be severe. There may be internal damage. From the disordered magic."

"I would have noticed that," the Night Nurse said, voice sharpening. "I don't need your assistance to do my job any more than I need his."

"He feels... there's an aura around him, something familiar. Not Chthon," Wanda hastened to add, before any of the others could suggest it. "Something warmer, sharper." She studied Strange more closely, looking past the bandages and pallor and the tired lines around his eyes to the faint hum of magic that still clung to him. The feel of it brought back a vivid memory of standing at the high altar of St. Margaret's, fingers clenched tightly around the brass altar rail that had been the only thing keeping her on her feet.

"The spear," she said slowly. "He drew power from the spear. A great deal of it."

There was a murmur of sound from the hallway outside – the building was a warren of little hallways and rooms, thin, pasteboard walls partitioning up what had once been either a warehouse or a factory floor – and Wanda lifted her hands, calling her power to her and trying not to notice that the energy she could feel welling up inside her was less intense than it had been before. Even constrained by her new wards, she had more than enough power behind her hexes to take care of anyone unfriendly about to walk through the exam room's door.

Cap entered the room first, ducking his head slightly as he came through the doorframe, as if he expected the jamb to be too low to clear the top of his head; it wasn't, but only by a few inches. He was in civilian clothes, the collar of his old-fashioned trench coat turned up against the cool night air.

If Wanda hadn't know what was in the artist's portfolio he carried slung over one shoulder, she might have been fooled into thinking that he was some ordinary citizen who'd stumbled into the Night Nurse's clinic by accident. Then Tony and Sam appeared in the doorway behind him, flanking him – Tony on the left, in the spot where a left-handed person would do the most good in a fight, and Sam on the right, his eyes glinting gold in the hard fluorescent lighting – and the illusion was shattered.

"What happened to him?" Sam nodded at Strange. "I thought he was pretty much indestructible."

The Night Nurse grimaced. "Only in his own mind, unfortunately."

"I believe he attempted to cleanse the cathedral of Chthon's power," Wong said. "Chthon... took steps to protect itself, and he tried to use the power stored in Loki's spear in his defense."

"It looks like that didn't work out well," Cap said, dryly. Behind him, Jan slipped into the room, shutting the door behind her. She was in street clothes, too, the three-inch heels of her boots somehow nearly silent on the tiled floors.

"It's my fault," Daredevil mumbled. "I dragged him there, and then I didn't hear the guy who stabbed him."

"Stabbed?" Tony's eyebrows arched. "I thought he'd been fried by magical feedback."

"That too," Wanda said. "How did you guys know to come?"

"Wong called us." Jan nodded to where Wong was standing by Strange, exchanging significant glances with the Night Nurse while she wrote something down on the clipboard that Wanda assumed contained Strange's medical information. She wondered what kind of entry one would make on a medical chart for "metaphysically attacked by an elder god."

"How badly is he hurt?" Cap asked, in the tone of someone who had already mentally taken charge of the situation. Cap tended to do that; it made him a good tactical leader for the Avengers. It also made him incredibly frustrating to work with at times, if his idea of the best course of action was different from your own.

Right now, though, it felt obscurely comforting to have Cap stride in and take charge of things. It was something familiar, something Wanda had thought that she had lost forever, during those few brief hours when she had believed that Cap was dead.

It would be dangerous to let herself rely on that comfort too heavily. She had run to Strange for protection from Chthon, and now Strange was unconscious on the Night Nurse's exam table, and he had had the knowledge and abilities to defend himself from a being like Chthon. Cap and the other Avengers had only second-hand experience with magic. If Chthon broke free, all Cap and Clint and Simon would be able to do if they stood against him was die. Again.

The Night Nurse was explaining Strange's injuries to the Avengers, her gestures short and jerky, as if being forced to repeat the information over again offended her. Daredevil had retreated back to the far wall, seeming uncomfortable in the now tightly crowded room. He'd never struck her as a people person.

At least Simon was safe in California. Maybe she ought to be grateful that he hadn't spoken to her yet. Apologizing to Clint had been difficult enough; she didn't know how she was going to face Simon again, after Chthon had used her to destroy Vision. She couldn't afford to mourn Vision yet, not with Chthon still attempting to break free, and she couldn't be around Simon without mourning him.

"You have a really impressive set-up here," Falcon was saying, waving a hand at the array of portable and semi-portable and not-really-intended-to-be-portable-but-jury-rigged-so-that-it-could-be medical equipment that surrounded them. "It looks like you could do just about anything for him that a hospital could. You ought to be getting some kind of support from the city for all this."

"Not as long as I keep treating anyone in a costume without asking what their real name is or how they got that interesting gunshot wound or laser burn. Bloomberg wouldn't like my expense reports." She gestured at Strange. "How would I itemize having him put up wards around the operating room? Or put the kind of injuries he's got now or that half the rest of you get into a normal medical file?"

The Falcon nodded, smiling a little. "I know what you mean."

Tony was frowning at Strange as if personally offended. "This entire thing doesn't make sense. Wanda used the spear's power, and she's fine."

She had been wondering that herself. If Chthon had been able to flatten Strange so easily, how had she managed to get free of him? "I did use it," she agreed, "and it didn't hurt me at all. And Strange has twice the experience I do with magic."

"I think being stabbed probably had something to do with it," Daredevil said, nodding toward Strange.

The Night Nurse shook her head. "I've seen him work magic with more severe injuries than that."

Wong nodded. "Including stab wounds. I believe it was the nature of the chaos magic in the spear. Chaos magic can only be safely accessed if the caster follows one of a number of complicated rituals. If Stephen tried to use it without those precautions..." he trailed off, looking grim.

"I've never needed rituals or incantations to do simple hexes." And even when she did use them, it was to refine and control the magic she had always instinctively been able to tap into. The difference between a sorcerer and an energy mutant, perhaps. "I suppose the fact that my powers work differently protected me."

"So what are we going to do now?" Jan asked the room at large. "Everyone was counting on Dr. Strange to take care of Chthon. The Avengers offered our help, but Wanda's our only magic user these days."

There was a brief, uncomfortable silence, as the Avengers carefully avoided Wanda's eyes. She resisted the urge to tug at her gloves nervously, and turned the half-finished reach to check the tattoo at the base of her neck into a tug at her hair. "I defeated him once," she said. "There has to be a way to do it again."

"Maybe we'll be lucky, and he'll just stay locked up in that church," Sam said. He glanced at Cap, and then both of them shook their heads slightly. "Or he'll find a way out, and we'll all be doomed."

"He'll find a way out," Cap said. "These kind of things always find a way out."

"We've used up far more than our share of good luck recently." Tony met Cap's eyes as he spoke, and the two of them shared a moment of silent communication that made Wanda very aware if how much she'd missed while Chthon had had her. The Avengers had presented her with a united front so far, as if the entire Superhuman Registration fight that she had heard so much about had never occurred, but there were moments when the attempt to put a brave face on things wore thin. They weren't always the moments she had expected, either.

Cap and Tony had always been close, but they hadn't used to have quite so many silent exchanges of glances, or surreptitious little touches that they obviously thought no one else saw. When Cap and Sam exchanged in-jokes or old-friends-who've-worked-together-for-years short-hand, it was mildly annoying, but no different than watching Clint and Hank snipe at one another. When he did the same thing with Tony, it felt oddly uncomfortable, as if Wanda were seeing something she shouldn't.

"There's no medical reason why Stephen shouldn't wake up soon." The Night Nurse touched Strange's bandaged left hand gently, much the way Wong had earlier – but coming from a supposedly clinical and detached medical professional, the gesture looked entirely different than it had coming from a close friend. And she had called him "Stephen."

Wanda told herself not to jump to conclusions – though it would explain both why the Night Nurse seemed almost personally offended by Strange's injuries, and why she had been visibly less than thrilled to see a strange woman arrive with Wong to check on him – and forced her attention back to the topic at hand. There were more important things at stake right now than Strange's admittedly morbidly fascinating love life.

"Even when he does wake up," she said, "I don't think I should keep staying with him. I placed myself under his protection when I ran to the Sanctum Sanctorum, but now, with Strange injured, I'll just be a big, flashing target putting him in danger. You, too," she added, before Wong could object.

"You can stay with us," Cap offered, and gave the other Avengers a stern, firm-jawed glance that dared them to disagree.

"Stark Tower has a lot of innocent bystanders in it," Jan said slowly. She looked faintly apologetic, as if she didn't like pointing it out.

It was true, though. An office building the size of Stark Tower was packed with potential victims for Chthon or any other supervillain from nine to five every day. It was probably a minor miracle that there hadn't been some kind of terrible disaster there yet. "Jan has a good point," Wanda began. "I appreciate the offer, but-"

"The Mansion doesn't have anyone in it right now but Steve and me," Tony interrupted. "You can even have your old room, if you don't mind some construction noises and the near total lack of furniture."

Construction, Wanda assumed, to repair the damage she had done. Saying yes felt strange, presumptuous, after everything that had happened, but she could think of nowhere else to go.

The last time she'd stayed at the mansion, Vision had been there, too. And Scott Lang. And Clint, and Jen, and... The last time she'd been there, the Avengers had still been a team, a family, and Chthon had used her to shatter them.

They were family again, now, but not one that Wanda had a place in. Not anymore.

Still, refusing would have been silly; turning down an offer of help to stay in cheap hotels out of her own sense of trite melodrama wouldn't help anyone, least of all the other guests in said hotels.

"Thank you," she said. "You don't have to-"

"It's Tony's house," Cap said, smiling a little awkwardly, the way he always did when people thanked him for things. "He can invite whoever he wants to stay there."

Wong offered her an equally awkward smile, protesting that she didn't have to leave, which was nice of him considering that she'd landed on his and Strange's doorstep virtually out of nowhere, with a literal demon on her heels.

Wanda thanked him for his hospitality, and told Cap that she'd be at the mansion's front gate by morning. The Sanctum Sanctorum was just one more place to hide. The things she'd done to her team and her home weren't going to go away if she avoided them.

* * *

Tony turned sideways, using his left forearm to block Steve's punch. The follow-up jab at his stomach, heavily pulled so that all it did was hurt rather than bruise internal organs or crack ribs, he unfortunately missed.

The punch had been deliberately easy to block, he realized, as he doubled over and fought to suck in a decent breath. Steve had distracted him with a blow he knew Tony would be able to see coming and react quickly to, and then sucker-punched him when he left his lower torso wide open.

Tony stepped back, out of Steve's reach, and forced himself to straighten up – he was only winded, after all, not actually hurt.

"And you accuse me of holding back," he panted.

"There's pulling your punches enough to avoid hurting your opponent, and then there's being afraid to punch him in the first place." Steve, unfairly, was neither out of breath nor even really sweating. Enhanced endurance had all kinds of benefits.

Just for that, Tony added extra force to the punch he threw at Steve's shoulder. Steve turned to deflect some of the force of the blow, but didn't manage to block it, and Tony felt a glow of satisfied accomplishment for a moment, before Steve launched a kick at his face.

He only just managed to dodge. Tony might have held back the first few times they had begun doing this again, and possibly once or twice after the incident at the Meridian, but he had been giving today's practice his all; his skin felt slick with sweat, and he could hear his heartbeat pounding in his ears.

Exercise came in a decided second on Tony's list of favorite ways to work up a sweat, but it made you feel alive in the same way that very fast cars, flying, or good sex could. There were few other things that could do that.

The gym at the mansion wasn't finished yet, and wouldn't be for at least another two weeks, so they were still using the one at the Avengers Tower – moving into the mansion was proving to be a slow, gradual process, and even now that the vast majority of both of their things had been moved over, and both they and Wanda were sleeping there, they still seemed to spend about eighty percent of their time in the tower. It was where everyone else was, where the fully functional lab was located, and where the gym didn't still have only half a floor.

Even when he was only practicing, Steve moved with a speed and lethal grace that Tony would always only be able to envy; if his attention weren't primarily occupied with trying to guess Steve's next movement, he would have been tempted to just watch and admire.

"I think Wanda's been settling in well," Steve said, as he slowly circled to the right – as attempts to distract Tony went, he had to admit, it was a decent try.

Tony turned to follow Steve's movements, keeping his hands up. "You mean she hasn't been possessed again at any point in the past three days, the Mansion is still standing, and Carol hasn't tried to kill her," he corrected.

"I'll talk to Carol." Steve came at Tony abruptly, aiming a flurry of blows at Tony's arms and shoulders. "We all agreed to give Wanda a second chance."

The next few moments were a blur of fists and impacts and the unbearably sexy muted sounds Steve made when he fought. Tony managed to disengage and dance backwards, wiping sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand before it could drip into his eyes. "You had to give her a second chance," he said, grinning at Steve, "or it would have been obvious that you only forgave me because you're sleeping with me."

Steve narrowed his eyes, his gaze never leaving the center of Tony's body mass, and said, with dignity, "I decided to forgive you long before I started sleeping with you."

He lunged at Tony, and Tony sidestepped, grabbed one of Steve's wrists, and forced his arm up behind his back in an arm-lock. "How long," he asked, saying the words directly into Steve's ear, "fifteen minutes?" He didn't have to try and make his voice husky – lack of breath and proximity to Steve did that for him.

Steve's body was flush against his, radiating heat like a furnace, and he could smell the sweat on his skin, the clean scent of the soap he used. It made him dizzy for a moment, suddenly hard and ready to turn this sparring match into something else entirely – and then Steve jabbed him in the ribs with the elbow of his free arm, slammed a heel into his shin, and yanked himself free.

"No," Steve said. "It was more like an hour. Then I saw that tape and almost changed my mind."

That tape – just the thought of what must have been on it still made Tony want to cringe, let alone the thought of other people _seeing_ it. Seeing him break down into a sobbing wreck, telling Steve's body things he would never have said to anyone living, including Steve himself. Desperately trying to justify everything he'd done.

Dum Dum Dugan had seen it. Sal Kennedy, he was sure, had seen it, too. In light of that, it was a minor miracle that Tony had managed to command even a shred of Dugan's respect.

And Steve... Steve had been livid, when Sal had shown it to him. Not, strangely, because he'd failed to accept or believe Tony's explanations, but because he _had_ believed them.

Tony wouldn't have traded away the outcome of Steve's reaction for anything, but still... On the other hand, it had made his crying-and-hallucinating experience last month marginally less humiliating, since whatever he'd said or done under the influence of A.I.M.'s toxin probably wasn't anything Steve hadn't seen before.

"I had good reasons for everything I did," he said now, as he watched Steve move and tried to decide when and how to attack again.

Steve's lips might have twitched slightly. "You always have good reasons. Or at least think you do."

"And I have good reasons now. We owe her. She needs our help." Steve knew that, of course, and being Steve, had offered it before Tony had even had a chance to suggest it

"I think we're the ones who need her help, actually," Steve said, his face wry.

"That too," Tony agreed. "I-"

"Hate magic. I know."

Tony spun on the ball of his right foot and launched a kick at Steve's stomach. Steve's hand clamped around his ankle and yanked, his foot sweeping Tony's supporting leg out from under him, and then Tony was flat on his back, staring up at the high, white ceiling. He rolled before Steve could pin him, and scrambled back to his feet. "I thought we were done with this whole chaos spear thing after Strange took care of it last spring." At least Strange was awake now, though the fact that Chthon had been able to take him out so easily made that less comforting than Tony would have liked. Worse, his hands were apparently going to take days, maybe weeks, to heal completely.

"Doom never lets anything go that easily." Steve bent backwards at the waist, letting Tony's next blow glide harmlessly past him. He was showing off, Tony suspected, the same way he was when he did one-handed back handsprings while holding twelve pounds of unwieldy metal.

"Bite your tongue, soldier boy. The last thing we need is for him to show up. He'd probably break Chthon out of his prison himself, and then we'd have to fight both of them."

"We may not have to fight either," Steve said, with determined optimism. "Wanda only said that he wants to break free, not that he actually can. Without her to take the spear for him, he's in the same place he's always been."

Which was true, but, "Chthon's been causing enough trouble from there. And we don't know she's safe from him." As failsafes went, magic tattoos were probably less-than-reliable. How did you test them? How did you calculate for margins of error when you were working with alchemical symbols and incomprehensible sorcerous scribbles?

Steve rushed him, moving too quickly for Tony's eyes to follow, even with a computer in his head. The floor slammed up to meet him again, and this time, he just lay there for a moment, his eye closed, Steve's knee a hard weight against his sternum.

"Less talking, more action, rich boy."

He could hear the smirk in Steve's voice without needing to open his eyes. He did anyway, and found himself staring up into Steve's flushed, grinning face.

"I can think of more entertaining kinds of action," Tony said, writhing in a vain attempt to buck Steve off. Steve was only a couple of inches taller than he was, the difference in height almost negligible, but forty extra pounds of mass meant that when Steve truly wanted Tony to stay put somewhere, moving wasn't really a viable option.

"I'm entertained," Steve told him. The sunlight from the gym's floor-to-ceiling windows streamed across his face, turning his eyelashes into nearly-invisible glints of gold. The bead of sweat sliding along his throat and down toward his collarbone taunted Tony – close enough to touch, but with both wrists pinned to the floor and Steve's considerable weight on his chest, he was unable to reach up and wipe it away.

Then Steve let go of him and sprang back to his feet, holding a hand down for Tony to grab. "Come on, on your feet, Avenger. You should have seen that throw coming two moves ahead."

Steve was right – it had been an obvious move, and as fast as Steve was, Tony still ought to have been able to avoid it, or at least avoid being so thoroughly pinned. What was wrong with him today? Tony was nowhere near Steve's level in hand to hand combat, and never would be, but he usually managed to avoid being flat on his back twice in under two minutes.

Ten minutes later, he'd hit the mat three more times, and when he wobbled getting back up the third time, Steve declared practice over with.

"We can finish this later, when you're not as distracted."

"I'm not distracted," Tony protested. "You always have my full attention."

"Which is why you answer your email and run virus scans on your armor while we're in bed together." Steve turned away, stripping off his sweat-soaked shirt, and tossed it onto a weight bench.

Tony took a moment to appreciate the sight, resisting the impulse to bend over and plant his hands on his knees, or let himself breathe too raggedly. Gasping and panting in front of Steve was one thing, but in an actual fight, it was an obvious declaration of weakness. He'd worked hard at concealing those, over the years. And Steve worried, after last month. "Once," he said, when he was sure he'd be able to get the word out without sounding too breathless. "I did that once. Pepper doesn't red flag things unless they really are urgent." The repeated emails he'd deleted unread from Sally Floyd since the reversal of M-Day had been red-flagged, too, as was pretty much everything Koening sent him, but Koening hadn't earned the right to have his instant attention at any hour of the day or night. Pepper had. He owed her that much.

Steve raised his eyebrows, skepticism played up just enough for Tony to tell that he was exaggerating it. "How urgent can something be at that time of night? The business world survived just fine for decades before the invention of email, and even these days, every CEO except you has to go offline and get away from his computer in order to sleep." He rubbed a towel over his face and hair as he spoke, every other word half-muffled by the fabric. Muscle glided under his skin with every movement; Steve's body was perfectly sculpted to a degree that an Olympic athlete would envy, not just from the supersoldier serum, but from hours of training and practice – after Tony left to shower and dash down six floors for his nine o' clock meeting with Stark Industries' R&amp;D department, Steve would probably spend another hour here, working first with the gymnastics equipment and then with his shield.

Tony's eyes were drawn down Steve's broad chest to his stomach, flat and ridged with muscle and completely unscarred. Perfect, as if Sharon Carter had never shoved the barrel of a gun against it and pulled the trigger at point blank range.

He would never get used to that unmarred perfection, no matter how often he saw it, touched it. Never get tired of it, either. The memory of the gaping wound in Steve's stomach, strangely bloodless in the autopsy photos, the better to reveal the blackened power burns around it, was going to be in his dreams forever. It was there even when he was awake, sometimes, a ghostly overlay when he looked at Steve. It didn't happen as often, anymore, but like the memory of Happy's face the last time he had seen him – black and purple and completely unrecognizable, and totally absent of any life, the sound of his heart monitor a cruel mockery in Tony's ears – he knew it would never leave him entirely.

He still hadn't completely gotten used to his own absent scars, either, but that was different; he'd had them his entire adult life, though few people had ever seen them. He'd probably been lucky that the shrapnel had hit him in the chest, and not someplace more visible. Like his face.

For someone whose entire body had been seamlessly healed of over a decade's worth of cumulative damage, this sparring match had taken a ridiculous amount out of him. He'd thought he was back in shape these days. A.I.M.'s toxin hadn't sidelined him for _that_ long.

When was the last time he'd eaten? he wondered. Maybe Steve had a point about coffee not actually being breakfast.

"Once I shower, I'll still have twenty minutes before Pepper comes looking for me," he said, smiling at Steve. "I'm going to see if there's anything to eat in the kitchen. Want to come?"

Steve's eyebrows arched. "You're going to voluntarily consume food before nine a.m.?"

"If I don't, I won't be eating until dinner. The board wants to discuss the past quarter's financial reports and stock performance. And then I'm supposed to go sit in on arbitration proceedings for that lawsuit with Hewlett Packard."

Steve said nothing to this, just waved Tony ahead of him toward the door. He was probably tired of hearing about the HP lawsuit, if not half as tired of it as Tony was. He hadn't stolen anyone's designs. He'd analyzed their tablet computer, figured out the basic principles behind it, and designed a completely different – and more importantly, actually functional – piece of technology around the same basic concept. That was going to completely dominate the market as soon as he released it, and end SI's dependence on military contracts and thus the last remnants of Koening's hold on him.

All that trouble, for a project that hadn't been half as interesting as the last thing he'd worked on for SHIELD. Just the thought of the hours of arguing to come made him feel tired, the adrenaline he'd worked up already draining out of him. Maybe if he thought of himself as the Glenn Curtiss of the computing world, valiantly defending his aircraft designs against unfair patent suits, today would be less boring.

At least it had started out on a high note, he thought, and followed Steve out of the room, letting his eyes linger on the broad planes of Steve's back.


	5. Chapter 5

**Authors' Note:**This chapter contains a discussion of (mind-control induced) dub-con.

* * *

**Chapter Five**

For a SHIELD installation, the building was poorly guarded. Perhaps the research here was considered unimportant, or perhaps they arrogantly assumed that their pretense at being a subsidiary of General Electric would protect them from the likes of her.

There hadn't even been any sentries outside, just a single guard by the front gate.

There were no guards inside, and the security cameras were easily disabled. SHIELD would have detected her presence the moment the first one went offline, but that was all right. Let them come; by the time their agents arrived, Sin and her men would be long gone.

The building was nearly empty at this time of night, but the lights in the lab were still on. Scientists like working late, particularly those working for secret organizations.

The door had a coded lock, but burst of machine gun fire made short work of it. Sin kept firing from the hip as she entered the room, aiming in only the most general sense. The gunfire drowning out the sound of the scientists screaming, bullets smashing through delicate equipment and making the body of the man who'd been standing closest to the door jerk and twitch fascinatingly.

They all wore little nametags on their lab coats, slips of plastic-coated paper with the logo of their imaginary shell company stamped on them. No SHIELD badges or insignia, but they were branded with the enemy's mark as surely as those who wore SHIELD's uniform. They took SHIELD's money, worked to further its goals, and shared in its guilt.

They had taken Brock from her, taken her father. They all needed to pay, and until she could have Barnes and Carter at her mercy, these worker drones would have to suffice.

_Synthia. Remember the plan. In and out, and leave nothing standing._

Her father's voice whispered at the edge of her mind, commanding and impatient, as always.

The room was a shambles now, sprayed with blood and filled with smoke from sparking and smoldering equipment. Nick Fury's severed head stared blankly at her from one of the workbenches, a line of bullet holes trailing down its forehead and between empty, robotic eyes. "Check the bodies," she ordered. "Kill anyone still breathing."

One of the scientists was sniveling under a workbench, begging for his life. As she turned to leave the room, there was another rattle of gunfire, and the noise thankfully stopped.

Three more targets to go, and SHIELD's supply of LMDs would be cut off. Without his army of duplicates to hide behind, Fury would have to come out of his hole and fight his enemies in person. When he did, Sin would be waiting for him.

SHIELD had stood in the way of her father's plans for years, stubbornly thwarting all attempts to impose a new and better order on the world. It had survived the Helicarrier's destruction, survived Stark's weak and faltering control, and her agents within its ranks had been eliminated. All attempts to re-infiltrate the organization had met with failure, and Doom had forbidden her to try again.

She had agreed. Let the filthy Latverian gypsy think he had the upper hand; she didn't need new agents within SHIELD, because destroying Fury would cut off the snake's head and draw the organization's fangs.

_"Fury must die,"_ her father's voice reminded her. _"He knows too much. And then Wilson, and Barnes. And Rogers. We will leave him for last. After we have taken the spear, after our new Reich has risen."_

Sin kicked a dead woman's arm out of her path, wrinkling her nose at the smear of blood the _untermench_ left on her boot, and knelt to plant the first of the explosives. She set the timer for fifteen minutes. Any of her men who took longer than that to get out of the building deserved the death they would get.

The explosion, when it came, was a thing of beauty. The shockwave hit her like a wall, leaving her skin hot and tingling the way Brock's fingers had, and the shell of the building left after it was gone burned in a brilliant chemical rainbow, the smoke acrid and stinging.

The rifle bullet she carried in her hip pocket was hard between her fingers, warm from her body heat. "That was for you, baby," she whispered. "You and Daddy. We're going to make them all pay."

The flames lit the horizon behind her as she drove away, on eye on the hypnotizing glow in her rearview mirror, and the other on her dashboard's digital clock.

The robotics lab was only a day's drive away from the city; she would return before that fool, Doom, even realized that she was gone.

* * *

Hank left the elevator quickly, his movements jerky, every line of his body radiating a mix of anger, frustration, and guilt. Clint sidestepped just in time to avoid running into him; Hank had a bad habit of taking his anger out on other people. Verbally, usually, but Clint wasn't in the mood for a pointless argument with Hank right now.

Wanda was downstairs, inside the tower's basement lab, there to undergo whatever medical and scientific tests Hank and Don had been able to think of, and a few that had been suggested by Tony. It was probably as close as he was going to get to speaking to Wanda alone without actually having to hunt her down and ask for a chance to talk to her.

Now he just had to grow some balls and stop lurking in the hallway.

She was down there with Don, he reminded himself. It wasn't like he was going to be cornering her while she was alone. If she wanted him to leave, if being too close to him scared her or made her nervous, all she'd have to do was say so, and he'd be gone, twice as fast as Hank had left.

At least Hank _was_ gone – Don and Hank glaring at one another in icy silence, or sniping nastily at each other, would only have made what was already going to be an excruciating conversation worse. Thor had made his feelings for Hank plain, and Tony as well, and Don not only tended to agree with the big guy, he was significantly bitchier as well. Obviously, the entire stock of sarcasm, spite, and passive aggressiveness that ought to have been split evenly between the two of them had all gone to Don Blake, with none left over for Thor.

Clint drew in a deep breath, sucked it up, and got into the elevator. It descended so quickly that his ears popped, the doors opening silently on mad scientist territory. He edged into the room, letting the doors slide shut behind him, trying to be as quiet as possible.

Wanda was fully clothed, thank God, sitting on a lab bench with her back to him while Don put a collection of intimidating-looking medical equipment away.

"I'd say you were lucky," he said. "There's no permanent damage from your ordeal. As far as Dr. Pym and I can tell, you're fine." He smiled at Wanda, and at Clint, over Wanda's shoulder. "Your brain patterns are normal, your blood work is normal, the genetic scan shows no alterations. You've lost about ten pounds, but that's not surprising considering the circumstances. I doubt Chthon bothered to feed you that often."

"I wouldn't know," Wanda said wryly, and Clint felt a moment of intense gratitude that nothing that left permanent scars or damage had happened to her, that no one had hurt her that badly. And also, selfishly, that he himself had never been under long-term mind control.

They ought to have had Beast come and examine her – he was the mutant expert, and the geneticist – but while Clint was sure he would have come, if one of the Avengers had been willing to ask him, Wanda, when it was suggested to her, had point blank refused and nearly begged them not to contact any of the X-Men. Not yet.

Clint couldn't blame her. He sure as hell wouldn't have wanted to see them. Looking at Wanda sitting there on the lab bench was bad enough.

He couldn't look at the dark hair falling down her back without remembering what it had felt like, couldn't look at the clothing without remembering the body under it. The body she'd never chosen to show to him.

"These marks on your hands..." Don indicated one of Wanda's hands, and the spiky black design on the back that made it look like someone else's. "Did Strange tell you if they were going to affect you in any way?"

She shook her head. "They limit the power I can draw on, and block Chthon's access to me. Other than that, they're no different from tattoos."

"In that case, I think you're all right. But tell me if you start experiencing any unusual symptoms; mind control on this scale, for this long, isn't really covered in medical literature." He shook his head, smiling ruefully. "At least, not that I've read. I've missed a couple of years' worth of it."

Wanda had turned slightly to face him, giving Clint a view of her profile. Any moment now, she was going to notice that he was in the room. Then he would have to say something to her. "I didn't know mind-control was covered at all."

"Dr. McCoy wrote an article on it a few years ago. It dealt mostly with telepathy and brainwashing, though. With magic, all bets are off." He reached for his walking stick, leaning against the edge of a lab bench, and then, turning to Clint, said, "Sorry, Clint. I was just finishing up with Wanda. Is there something you need? Are your ears-"

"I'm fine," he said. "I... um..."

Wanda turned, and her face went stiff when she saw him.

"I wanted to-" he started, and then stopped, his brain abruptly running out of words. He hadn't been this inarticulate since the last time he'd tried to make up with Bobbi, before... he hadn't been this inarticulate for a long time. Maybe he shouldn't ask to speak to Wanda alone. Maybe she didn't _want_ to speak to him.

He owed it to her to give her the chance, though. He cleared his throat and started again, trying to not stare at her or loom or sound suspicious or threatening. "Wanda, can I, um, can I talk to you? Alone? It's fine if you don't want to," he added quickly.

Wanda looked down at her hands, then back up at Clint, her face carefully expressionless. "I think we need to," she said. Her voice was even, but Clint could hear the strain in it.

"I'll leave you alone, then," Don said, and Clint almost told him not to. Asking him to leave was a bad idea; it would probably be less threatening if he stayed, and he was a nice safety barrier between Clint and having to actually look Wanda in the face. Even if the idea of someone else hearing what Clint and Wanda were about to discuss was... well, the whole team might be learning about it soon enough. Maybe it would have been easier to get it over with one at a time.

He'd never be able to speak to Jan or Carol again, or Sam, probably. Sam would be disgusted and disappointed when he heard, and would immediately tell Cap, who would promptly kick Clint off the team. And rightly so, and he probably ought to have left already, except... but he couldn't tell Cap when he hadn't spoken to Wanda, because she might not want Cap or anyone else to know what Clint had done to her. Bad enough, probably, that he'd told Carol and Tony.

If she wanted to keep it quiet, he'd have to think of some other excuse to leave. He'd been putting it off, like a coward, because the team was his home and he had no idea where else he was going to go.

As Don walked toward the elevator, Wanda climbed down off the table and straightened her skirt. It was the same one she'd worn at Strange's place, the drab-looking navy one. She looked awful in it, all pale and washed out.

There were circles under her eyes, and something about the expression in them reminded Clint of Jan and Tony in the hospital, staring at horrible things that didn't exist outside their own heads, or Hank, sick-looking and white-faced after Jan had flinched back from him.

"I don't know how to begin," she said. "There aren't words for it."

Somewhere behind Clint, the elevator doors closed, quietly, like they were trying not to disturb them.

"I know," Clint agreed. "I mean, I didn't know. I..." Maybe Cage and Rand were looking for an extra member for their Heroes for Hire group. Or maybe Rhodes would take him on as part of his superhero training program. Working with Rhodey wouldn't be so bad; he'd done it before, and it had worked well before half their teammates had been... possessed. Oh God.

"I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry for what I did to you."

Clint stared at her, not believing his ears for a moment. Maybe he did need to have Don check them out again, because she couldn't have just said–

"I didn't want to," she went on, her face twisting. "He made me. I didn't want to hurt any of you."

He swallowed, feeling sick. She was apologizing to _him_, as if it had been her fault. After he'd slept with her possessed body without her consent. Had she even known that they'd had sex? The thought made the entire thing seem, if possible, even worse. "You... of course you didn't. You were _possessed._ You weren't in control of your actions, and I slept with you anyway, and Carol thought you'd used some kind of mind-control or manipulation on me and must have wanted it, but if you were possessed..." Then it hadn't been Wanda who'd wanted the sex. It had been Chthon. And even if Clint had been... influenced... somehow, he'd still had more free will than she had. Like sleeping with a falling-down drunk person when you'd only had a couple of beers. "I'm sorry. Oh God, I'm sorry. I don't know why I did it."

"Clint." Wanda laid her right hand on his arm, and Clint's flow of words instantly dried up. "It's all right."

Things were so far from all right that Clint nearly wanted to laugh at that. "I slept with you while you were possessed, when you couldn't even tell me no, and then I left you there!" He felt weirdly conscious of the weight of her fingers on his sleeve, as if it were far more than the simple, friendly touch she meant it as.

"You were supposed to. Chthon was influencing over half the town, warping their memories to make them accept my presence as if I had always been there." She hesitated for a moment, then her eyes narrowed as she added, "Warping my memories so that I thought so, too." She let go of Clint's arm, frowning now, but he didn't think the expression was meant for him. "He was manipulating everyone around me, by the end, including my brother, or Pietro would never have tried to create Magneto's filthy dream world. Compelling you to leave would have been child's play compared to that. So would making you want me."

Clint shook his head. Standing this close, the circles under her eyes and the pallor of her skin were even more obvious; had she looked like this in Transia, three months ago? Would he have noticed if she had, with Chthon screwing with his head? "I don't remember any of that. Just you, and that bedroom in your house, and then I was in an airport somewhere, and it was days later. I didn't even think of going back for you, not for weeks. I should have done something to help you. If not then, then after."

She made an attempt at a smile, her lips curving upward slightly, but Clint could see the strain in it. "You did help me. Before you showed up, I was like a zombie – I didn't remember anything, not even who I was. You woke me up. It took me a long time to escape from Chthon's control, but without you, I would probably still be locked up in that house on Mount Wundagore. Or, worse, Chthon would already be free." She looked down at her hands again, tracing the line of Strange's tattoo with one finger. "I know I ought to be more upset that it happened," she said quietly, "that Chthon used you that way, but I can't be. I can't be sorry that I escaped from there. But I am sorry you were dragged into it."

Staring at her felt painfully awkward, suddenly, as if he were seeing things he wasn't supposed to. Seeing her naked – except he'd already done that. Clint turned away, pacing over to the nearest lab bench, the one where Hank's fume hood sat, looking like something out of a CSI episode. One where they were dealing with radiation poisoning or some kind of death-by-contagious-disease. Beyond it, in the back corner of the lab, hundreds of ants trundled their way through a glass-walled ants' nest, completely unaffected by Clint and Wanda's presence. "I thought I was going crazy, at first, or that... I don't know what I thought." He reached for one of the little test tubes, then remembered that if he touched anything down here, it would probably poison him or give him chemical burns. "That I'd made you sleep with me in return for not bringing you in, maybe."

"Why would you think that?" She sounded honestly shocked, so much so that Clint automatically turned to look at her; she was still standing by the table, maybe a step or so closer to him than she had been. "You would never do that, and I would never agree to it." There was absolute conviction in her voice, and looking at her, standing there alone with her, suddenly got a little easier. "I don't really... remember much about what we did," she added, much more hesitantly, "it's all kind of vague, but I know you didn't hurt me or force me to do anything. I wanted to help you, because you seemed so sad. Or that's what he made me think, anyway."

This was all... Clint felt like he was missing parts of the conversation. They'd both been mind controlled, she was sorry she'd slept with him, she wasn't sorry she'd slept with him; she'd wanted to, she hadn't wanted to. He tried asking about one of the parts he was mostly sure of. "So... you don't want me to leave the team, then?"

"No!" She shook her head, hard, dark curls swaying with the motion. "You and Cap and the others are some of the only family I have left. I don't even know if Pietro's still alive, or if he'll ever want to see or speak to me again if he is." She paused, meeting his gaze and giving him a long, serious look; Clint had to fight the impulse to glance away. "Clint, I killed you. Twice. And Scott, and Vision. And..." her voice broke, and she looked away, her face twisting. "You sleeping with me while we were both under mind control isn't even in the same league as that."

"That wasn't your fault." She had brought him back from the dead, and she wasn't crazy anymore, and seeing Wanda be Wanda again and knowing that it _hadn't_ been Wanda who had turned on them all and killed him was such a relief that beside that, who cared about some sex that hadn't exactly been unpleasant anyway?

Well, that hadn't been unpleasant for him. He could only hope it hadn't been unpleasant for her. Did it make it better that she apparently couldn't remember it clearly, or worse? Worse, probably – God, he might as well have been sleeping with a puppet, for all the input she'd had.

"I know," Wanda said, in a tight, choked voice, "but that doesn't bring them back. It doesn't make it any easier. I keep seeing it every time I close my eyes – the mansion burning, Vision being torn apart..." She trailed off, one hand pulling and twisting at the fabric of her jacket sleeve.

Clint knew that feeling far better than he wanted to, both the guilt he could see in her face and the way memories you didn't want stayed on constant repeat in your head. After a long moment of silence, he offered, "I used to dream about seeing Bobbi get... burned."

Neither of them spoke for what felt like a very long time. Clint stared at the patch of wall just above and slightly to the left of Wanda's head. She wasn't looking directly at him, either.

The silence stretched long enough to be painful, long enough for Clint to remember exactly what Bobbi's face had looked like when Mephisto's fireball had hit her in the back. He didn't really remember dying, or whether or not it had hurt, and he wasn't about to ask Cap about it, but he suspected that the answer was yes, that it hurt a lot.

"I'm just glad you're back," he said, suddenly needing to say _something_, anything that wasn't about death or burning or regrets it was too late to do anything about. "And I'm sorry for..." How did you even say this – _'I'm sorry we were mutually date-raped?' 'I'm sorry you have to remember watching your husband die and knowing his killer used you to do it?'_ – "I'm sorry Chthon did that to you."

She probably would have said something in response to that, but Clint didn't stay to hear what it was. He didn't actually run out of the room, but when the elevator doors closed behind him, he felt as shaky and breathless as if he'd just finished a wildly out-of-control sprint.

It had been Chthon. It hadn't been him. It hadn't been her. He wasn't actually the kind of man that would rape a woman, and she didn't hate him for it, and he hadn't hurt her.

Chthon had been inside his _head_. In his head, making him do things.

Clint ran his fingers through his hair, then leaned his head back against the wall of the elevator, trying not to think about what _else_ Chthon could have done while he was in there, if he had felt like it. He should probably feel more traumatized. He'd been... rape was much too strong a word for it. He'd been _coerced_ into having sex that hadn't been his idea. He'd been used as a weapon against Wanda the same way she'd been used against the team.

Maybe it was good that he couldn't remember the entire thing very clearly. At least his vivid memories of her naked body and the vague idea that it had been pleasant were all he'd taken away from it, and he didn't actually know what Wanda was like in bed. That would have been... wrong. Even more personal than the things he did remember.

He'd never asked her what she wanted him to tell the rest of the team. Maybe Cap and Sam and Thor didn't have to know; at least she'd have some privacy left that way.

She didn't blame him. She didn't hate him. She didn't want him to leave.

It hadn't been her.

Maybe if he told himself that often enough, it would get easier.

* * *

The elevator between Tony's basement lab and the Avengers' apartments rose with perfect silence; even more than the brass and wood paneling, that spoke for how expensive it was. Don, watching the floor indicator climb with impressive swiftness, wondered morbidly what would happen to anyone who happened to be in the lab if the building's power ever went out. As far as he'd been able to tell, there were no stairs between the lab and the ground floor lobby. On the other hand, forgetting to plan for disaster was not among Tony's failings; there had to be some alternative way out of there, not to mention a way to get massive pieces of equipment in and out. The elevator was the size of a freight elevator, but even it wouldn't have been able to accommodate some of the things that Don had watched slowly disappear from the lab over the past week, which had included giant arc welders, a massive sets of jacks for propping up quinjet engine blocks, and one of Tony's two Cray computers – slightly outdated, but they apparently had some kind of nostalgia value – along with half the contents of a machine shop.

All the medical equipment and bioscience stuff remained, or examining Wanda would have required taking her back to Oklahoma, to his vastly-less-well-equipped-than-anything-Tony-owned clinic. Advanced diagnostic equipment was hard to come by in the middle of nowhere, and Thor had deliberately chosen the middle of nowhere to rebuild Asgard.

She'd been all right, at leaSt. Or mostly all right – if he were a psychologist, he would probably have a laundry list of post-possession warning signs to watch out for, but all of his medical training had dealt with more concrete ailments. _Physically_, she was all right.

He'd been dreading the alternative. Being the only general practitioner in a small town had its disadvantages, one of which was explaining to a patient whom he'd just diagnosed with cancer that he didn't think the 'out of towners who'd built that big castle' were the kind of gods who performed miraculous healings. There were times when he would have been willing to trade all of Thor's strength and power in return for the ability to cure leprosy or blindness or paralysis with a touch.

Don shoved the thought aside as the elevator came to a halt. He might as well wish for the ability to raise the dead, while he was at it. Asgardian cosmology wasn't as forgiving as some.

Steve and Tony's cat was waiting outside the elevator. It gave an odd, creaky chirp, and did its level best to trip him before he could even get through the elevator doors, rubbing against his ankles and coating his pants with orange fur.

"No," he told it firmly, pushing it away from the closing doors with his cane. "You're not going down there."

The cat – exactly what its name was seemed to depend on who you asked – made an offended wheezing sound, and stalked away down the hall.

"I have no freakin' clue how she got there!" Sam Wilson's voice came loudly from the open door of the communications room, making the cat go low and dash out of sight. "Redwing was watching the outside of the building, and he never saw her."

"She didn't come in; she just... appeared." Tony's voice, equally startled and offended-sounding. "It's either magic, or some kind of teleportation device. Come on; I've told the security guards not to try to approach her."

They had a security breach. Don changed course for the communications room, walking as quickly as he could. _'Morgan le Fay?'_ he wondered. Some new magical troublemaker? _'Please, don't be the Enchantress,'_ he begged silently. Amora had sworn she wasn't going to cause any trouble, but her word meant little, and she and the Executioner were probably bored with lying low by now; two months back from the dead, and they hadn't tried to kill or brainwash anybody yet. That was very nearly a record.

He nearly collided with Tony and the Falcon on his way into the room, both of them intent on shoving their way out and toward the elevator. "Carol's in LA, of course. Steve's told her that she needs to pick a team and-" Tony broke off abruptly, jerking to a stop inches away from Don.

Forward momentum kept Don stumbling forward a step despite his attempt to stop, and only the Falcon's hand on his arm kept him from smacking straight into Tony.

"Sorry," Tony said, holding both hands up. "I didn't know you were-"

Don wasn't listening; he could see one of the security monitors over Tony's shoulder, displaying a slightly grainy view of the buildings front lobby.

"Damn it." The words burst out before he remembered that he wasn't talking to Tony. "That's Loki!"

"She's who?" Sam was staring at him, eyebrows arched. "Since when has Loki been a woman?"

"Don't ask," Don muttered. He glanced down at his cane, debating for a half-second the merits of turning into Thor and letting him handle this. On the one hand, with Carol apparently back on the West Coast for the day, Thor was the only Avenger here capable of going toe-to-toe with Loki. On the other hand, Loki might very well react to Thor's appearance in the lobby by blowing the building up, along with all the innocent bystanders who happened to be in it.

He started to run for the elevator, ignoring the way his knee twinged at each step and praying that it wouldn't pick now to suddenly go out from under him. Damn Odin's sense of humor, anyway.

"I don't care who it is," Tony was saying, dashing past him and through the already-opening elevator doors – the whole building did things like that for him, thanks to his new cyborg upgrades. "I want her out of my lobby."

"Clint and Wanda are downstairs in your lab," Don told him, as the elevator doors slid shut behind the three of them. "You should call them and-"

"I don't know if that's a good idea," the Falcon interrupted. "The Scarlet Witch just got rid of the last evil chaos magic thing that possessed her. The last thing we need right now is for her to face off against Loki and get screwed with some more."

"Maybe he's – she's," Tony corrected himself, "maybe she's not here to fight. Maybe she's just here to taunt us."

Wishful thinking, almost certainly, but it did sound like something Loki would do.

"Oh, and you two should probably stand back a couple of feet," Tony added.

Don was about to refuse and stay put when he saw the briefcase clutched in Tony's left hand. He and the Falcon both backed off as far as the confines of the elevator car would let them, while Tony's armor flew around him in a dangerous-looking whirlwind of red and gold metal. When the elevator doors opened on the lobby, moments later, Tony was completely armored up, and Don was the only one left who wasn't in costume.

Loki was standing dead center in the lobby, her feet planted in the middle of the silvery design – some kind of electrical diagram – inlaid in the marble floor. Dark-uniformed security guards and a dozen or so men and women in business attire were clustered nervously against the walls, staring at her.

The green and yellow fabric of her cloak made the colors around her seem dull, and her golden helmet blazed like fire in the natural light that flooded the three-story-high room, courtesy of the immense windows. If it came to a fight, the falling glass from shattering windows alone could be potentially lethal.

"I have come to deliver a message to my stepbrother," she was proclaiming, in a voice that echoed off the high ceiling.

She turned and saw them then, and her face, so eerily similar to Sif's, contorted in a sneer. "I see my darling brother is too busy to speak to me, and sends his mortal companions in his stead. Unless..." her eyes went to Don, and her sneer shifted to something more amused, a sort of contemptuous smirk. "The little doctor. It's always such a pleasure to see you, brother, whatever form you hold, but I cannot fathom your attraction to this fragile mortal shell. It doesn't become you."

"I could say the same thing about your current form." The words were out before Don could think better of them, and he tightened his grip on his cane, ready to slam it into the ground and let Thor take over if Loki responded to his jab with violence.

She laughed, the sound ringing hollow like the sound of bells.

"What do you want, Loki?" Tony asked; his helmet amplified and flattened his voice, making it ring nearly as loudly as hers did.

Loki ignored him, her gaze never leaving Don. "Come closer, my brother. I would speak with you."

"He can hear just fine from over here," the Falcon called back, taking a step forward so that his body was halfway in front of Don and Loki. His teammates occasionally forgot that he was a superhero as well, and every bit as capable of defending himself as they were; maybe it was the cane.

Don stepped sideways, giving himself a clear view of Loki once more. "Speak with me about what?"

"I wish to offer my aid against one of your enemies," she said, smiling faintly as if she thought that there were even the slightest chance of either Don or Thor believing her. "In return, I ask for your assistance in reclaiming what is mine."

Behind Loki, some of the businessmen were creeping silently toward the door. One woman had slipped off her high heeled shoes and clutched them in one hand, walking in her stocking feet to keep from making any noise. If they could keep Loki distracted for a few minutes longer, they would have significantly fewer potential hostages to worry about.

Don raised his eyebrows, not bothering to hide his skepticism. "Pretending for a second that I believe you, which enemy?"

"The Elder God, the embodiment of entropy." Loki waved a dismissive hand, her long nails glinting like talons. "Chthon. Have you any other enemy intent upon stealing one of my possessions?"

"You mean the spear?" Damn it, he was not actually having a conversation with Loki. With new, disconcertingly attractive Loki and her vulpine smile and bottle-glass-green eyes that were the only part of Thor's stepbrother face that he could still recognize in her. "You've been content to ignore it for the past several thousand years. Why do you care what happens to it?"

"Because it's _mine_." The temperature in the room dropped perceptibly as she snarled the words, and behind him, Don could hear the faint hum of Tony's repulsor gauntlets powering up. "The All-Father hid it from me behind barriers I cannot break, before he tried to banish me to eternal torment. For centuries, I could not even sense where it lay, but now his death has weakened the protections he placed upon it, and that mortal fool Doom's actions in this city last spring damaged them still further, allowing anyone who cared to look to feel the spear's power." She smiled at him, the angry sneer turning into a familiar, ingratiating grin in an instant. In the back of Don's head, he could feel Thor's automatic suspicion – that smile always meant trouble. That was the 'Trust me, I have a plan' smile, and even when they weren't evil, Loki's plans generally ended in humiliation for everyone involved except him, and occasional public crossdressing. "My powers are weaker since my resurrection, brother, and Chthon's have grown. He touches the world, through his human avatars, and seeks to make all chaos power his own. He would use my stolen power, the portion of my essence that is bound within Baldur's Bane, to break free of his prison, and doom all of creation. Not just Midgard, but Asgard and Jotunheimr and all the rest of the nine worlds as well. And Olympus, and K'un L'un, and every other realm connected to this dimension."

"But you're going to help us stop him, just out of the goodness of your heart?" Sam asked dryly. He'd shifted his weight onto the balls of his feet, knees slightly bent – ready to move if Loki tried anything.

Loki didn't so much as glance at him. "Use the powers the All-Father left to you to break down his protections, allow me to claim the spear for my own and take its power back into myself, and Chthon will no longer be able to lay claim to it."

The last of the bystanders had slipped through the door now, leaving just the security staff to get caught in any crossfire, and through the glass doors, Don could see Steve outside on the sidewalk, directing people away from the building. Tony must have used his Extremis abilities to call him. Jan, too, he realized – there was a small, moving dot barely visible just inside the door, flying towards the security personnel.

Back-up was here, if not quite the heavy-hitting back-up Carol would have represented.

"So, rather than making Chthon more powerful, you want us to make you more powerful instead?" Don asked. It was as much a rhetorical question as it was anything else – regaining the power stored in the spear would make Loki one of the strongest of the resurrected Asgardians, her powers a match for anything but the Odin force, and Thor preferred to avoid using that at almost all costs. Don didn't blame him; leading Valhalla was a crushing responsibility at times, he knew, but the powers Odin had wielded and passed on to his son were even more oppressive, and not simply because one's own near-death was required in order to master them fully.

She raised an eyebrow. "The power is rightfully mine, not Doom's or Chthon's or anyone else's. Such suspicion. One would think I was offering you threats instead of my hand in aid." Her voice was poisonously sweet.

Steve was standing in the doorway now, his shield in hand. From the look on his face, he was about to throw Loki's offer of 'aid' back in her teeth. Don beat him to it.

Prior to the Ragnarok, Loki had tried to kill Don repeatedly, tried to kill Jane Foster, tried to kill at least a half-dozen other people Don knew, and generally made his life a living hell more times than he cared to count. "Help from you?" he snapped. "So you can turn around and stab us in the back as soon as you have the spear back? You must think we're either insane or stupid."

Loki's smile was cold now, revealing teeth just a fraction too sharp to belong to anything human. "No, I merely had hoped that you would choose to follow the wisest course available to you. My aid is not a thing to be dismissed lightly. We were brothers once; does none of that bond remain?"

The hot flash of rage that filled Don was unexpected – his skin felt too tight, suddenly, his face hot, and he couldn't tell how much of the emotion choking him was his, and how much was Thor's. "You murdered Thor's brother!" he shouted at her. "What the hell do you think? He trusted you once and you betrayed him!" He had trusted him – her – like a brother, fought beside her, drunk mead with her and laughed with her and– The memories of Baldur convulsing in his arms, bubbles of blood at his lips while his breath wheezed with a wet, gluey note that Don's medical training recognized as the sound of someone drowning on the fluid in their lungs... were not his memories. They were still as vivid in his mind as the first time he'd ever had a patient flatline.

Loki made a pouty little moue that filled Don with the desire to wipe the expression off her face, and said, "So bitter. One would think Baldur were still in his grave. Save your anger for those it truly belongs to, brother."

"We're not accepting your help," Steve said, his voice as calm and controlled as if he hadn't just witnessed Don screaming accusations at Loki. "So you can turn around and leave, Mister. I mean, Ma'am."

Loki swung around to look at him, putting her back toward Don. "Bold words, from a mortal with no powers to his name. My business is with Thor, not you."

_'I am getting really tired of you treating me like I don't exist,'_ Don thought, glaring at the iridescent sheen of her cape. "Thor's not here right now," he spat. "And if he were, he wouldn't be inclined to listen to you."

_Traitor._ The word rumbled in his head. _Oathbreaker._

"I think what we're all trying to say," Tony announced loudly, "is that your presence in my lobby is making everyone in the building nervous. I suggest you leave before we end up having to make you. If your offer is sincere, we can discuss it somewhere else. Someplace I haven't just spent several million dollars repairing." He raised both hands, the repulsor ports in his palms a glaringly bright blue-white. "These may not be able to kill you, but I can guarantee it will be painful."

"We're not discussing it. She's leaving." Apparently, Tony hadn't had his fill of working with manipulative scum who wanted to destroy them. One would think he'd have learned, by this point, that there were some people you didn't want to get into bed with, no matter what they threatened or how persuasive they could be.

"I see you've decided not to be reasonable," Loki said coolly. "I had hoped we might discuss this as friends, as befits kinsmen, but since you insist upon spurning my offers of peace..." She shook her head, her expression a parody of regret. "I know where Sif is. Give me the spear, and when I have it safely in my grasp, I will tell you of her location. Persist in this foolish stubbornness, and I shall see to it that you never lay eyes on her again."

This time, the rage was entirely Thor's. Don felt it anyway, magnified by his own frustration at their inability to find his alter-ego's lover; he'd wanted to find her badly, for Thor – at least one of them should get to have a fresh start with the woman he loved.

"Stay away from her," he snarled. "If you're even telling the truth, which I doubt." Loki had not been called the Father of Lies for nothing; she lied as easily as she breathed. And threats against a conveniently absent Sif were exactly the sort of bluff she would make.

Loki smirked at him. Her skin was pale in the bright sunlight, and at one temple, Don could see the edge of a blue tattoo – the tribal markings of a frost giant, not entirely hidden by her hair. She had every reason to hate Thor, and no reason to help him. "You sound most certain, brother. Certain enough to risk thy paramour's life? Ah well," she gave an elaborate shrug, "mayhap Baldur or Heimdall will be more accommodating."

Don's ears popped as the air pressure in the room dropped, and he wasn't sure whether it was he or Thor who growled, "Get out, and stay away from my family."

Loki raised a mocking eyebrow. "Which one?" Her glance around the room at the other Avengers – the first time she'd looked at any of them, save for that one glance at Steve – made her meaning obvious.

"Both of them!"

She strode forward – behind him and slightly to his right, he could hear the Falcon's hard light wings snapping out, hear Iron Man's repulsors crackling – and then she was in front of him, towering over Don by half a foot. "The day will come when you will wish that you had accepted my aid, Thunder God." She reached out and laid one finger against Don's face, just beside his left eye, the end of her talon-like nail resting against his skin. It took an exercise of willpower not to flinch.

"Such pretty blue eyes," she whispered. "Always looking at me with such disguSt. Would she like you as well if I plucked this one out?"

"Step away from him, Loki," Steve called, but he didn't throw his shield, though Don could tell from the way he held it that he wanted to.

Loki's finger slid slowly down the side of his face, coming to rest under his chin. "If you reconsider, Son of Odin, you have but to call me. I am always willing to negotiate. You have but to hold this ring, and utter my name, and I shall hurry hence to do thy bidding." Her hand closed around his right wrist, gripping just hard enough to remind him that she could crush every one of the delicate bones there with a single squeeze, and forced his clenched fingers open, folding them closed again around something hard and round.

Then she took a step backward, and vanished into thin air, her wide, unfriendly smile the last thing to disappear.

Steve's shield whooshed through the air where she had been, a fraction of a second too late, and clanged loudly off one of the support pillars that held up the third-floor balcony.

Don stared down at the gold ring that glinted malevolently up at him from his right palm, and resisted the urge to rub at his face where Loki's hand had been. He could still feel her nail sliding over his face, leaving a trail of tingling skin, as if she were still touching him.


	6. Chapter 6

**Chapter Six**

The kitchen in Stark Tower's penthouse was not large enough to comfortably accommodate eight people, but the kitchen was where the team had always gathered to hold discussions too informal to have around a council room table, so once Loki had left and the men and women who had fled the building to huddle in little knots on the sidewalk outside had all come back in, and the police had been assured that there was no need for their presence, the kitchen was where everyone went.

The room was full of the sound of too many people speaking too loudly, all at once. Hank was apologizing to Jan for not getting back from wherever he'd stormed off to in time to help confront Loki. Wanda was protesting to Sam that she and Clint should have been told about Loki's arrival immediately, and that she couldn't help them if she didn't know what was going on. Clint was on the phone with the West Coast Avengers, filling Carol in. And Tony was making a thus far unsuccessful attempt to get Steve and Thor to see reason.

"I think we sent her away too soon," he said, for the second time. "We should have heard her out."

"Loki's words are oft as dangerous as her actions," Thor said flatly. He was actually talking to Tony now, Loki's appearance having presumably provided the distraction of someone he hated even more.

"Loki's still more of a known quantity than Chthon is," Tony countered. "Yes, obviously, she'll try to stab us in the back, but if she helps us defeat Chthon first, then whatever treachery we have to deal with afterwards will be the lesser of two evils. We're majorly outclassed in terms of magical firepower right now." He turned to Steve, who could be counted on to be practical when it came to tactics. "You saw what Chthon did to Strange. If we try and fight both him and Loki at the same time, we're going to lose both battles."

"I hate to admit it," Sam said, turning away from Wanda and joining the conversation, "but that is actually a good point."

There was silence as everyone considered this, and Clint's too-loud words into the cordless phone he was holding between his shoulder and right ear were clearly audible for a moment. "Get back to New York, okay? This is more important than your booty call with Spider-Woman. I thought you guys were 'taking a break from each other' anyway."

"Loki despises us all utterly and is naturally aligned with Chaos," Thor rumbled. "There is nothing to stay her from deciding to help Chthon instead with the intent of turning upon _him_ later. Or of ruling the worlds at his left hand."

"Right hand," Jan corrected.

Clint pulled the phone away from his mouth and turned slightly to face the rest of them. "No, he's an evil Chaos deity. It would be his left hand."

"Left-handed people aren't automatically evil, you know," Tony said, knowing it was off topic but unable to resist making the protest. Especially since, from Clint, it was probably an intentional attempt at being annoying, since he knew how irritating baseless superstitions were and couldn't possible have forgotten that Tony was the only left-handed person in the room.

"No, but left and counterclockwise have symbolic importance in more than one system of magic, left hands are ritually unclean in multiple cultures, and this is not important." Wanda stabbed a finger at Clint reprovingly, and he turned back to his phone conversation, shifting to put his back to them again.

Steve was frowning, his eyebrows drawn together in a way that was usually endearing but that, right now, was just irritating. He was going to be stubborn about this. Damn it. "We can't just hand Loki that kind of power," he said. "God knows what she'd do with it. She might not be as evil as Chthon, but she's a lot less predictable."

"Well, we know she probably won't destroy the world with it," Tony pointed out, his voice sharper than he'd meant it to be.

Thor gave him a dismissive glance, his eyes narrowed and full of almost palpable contempt. "It seems you are skilled at choosing lesser evils."

Tony winced, wanting automatically to deny it – wanting to deny anything that Thor said to him in that tone of voice – but knowing that it was true. He wasn't especially proud of it, but the ability to follow through on the most practical or effective course of action was vital in the business world as well as in politics and superheroing, and someone had to be the pragmatic one. "This has nothing to do with that," he said, instead. "Steve, will you just compromise for once? Sometimes surviving is more important than principles. We don't have to actually _give_ Loki the spear; just give her the impression that we'd be willing to if she helped us first."

Wanda opened her mouth to speak, but Steve beat her to it.

"This isn't about principles," he said shortly, blue eyes boring into Tony. "This is about not relying on people you know you can't trust."

"We can handle Loki," Tony protested. "We've done it before."

Steve's jaw tightened. "You always think you can handle things. Some things, some people, are too dangerous to control."

Tony drew a deep breath in through his nose, staring at the wall just beyond Steve's head and trying to ignore the frustrated tension creeping up the back of his neck. Someone had tacked an 'endangered raptors of North America' calendar up on one wall, where Steve's pen and ink sketch of the Manhattan skyline had once hung; otherwise, the walls were still as bare as they had been after the SHRA had been passed and Steve had been gone, when Tony had pulled all of the pictures in the apartment down.

He felt silly about that now, especially after weeks spent looking at the bare, unfinished walls of the Avengers Mansion as it was slowly rebuilt. Spending months living in a house with no pictures on the walls was not normal, but by the time he'd actually noticed how barren the apartment suite looked, Steve had been back for almost a month, and the boxes with the pictures in them were sitting in the middle of a dozen other boxes of Steve's things, waiting for him to unpack them.

He shouldn't be fighting with Steve, not over this. They'd just barely started unpacking. He shouldn't-

His chest felt tight, as if the air in the room lacked sufficient oxygen.

"Captain America is right," Thor was saying. "We must-"

"Remember what happened the last time we tried working with supervillains?" Hank interrupted.

"This is not the same as Registration!" Tony snapped, finally losing control over his temper. "And even if it were, compromise was the safest course of action then, and it's the best one now."

Steve slammed a hand down on the edge of the table, the sturdy wood absorbing the impact with a dull thud. "If we let Loki get her hands on that spear, everything she does with it will be our fault." His voice had risen until it was halfway to a shout, his face flushing red.

"You think I don't know that?" Why was it so hard to _breathe?_ His chest was starting to hurt, a sharp, familiar pain. "I'll take full responsibility for it if you want," he said, flinging his hands up angrily. "A little more blood on my hands is nothing next to saving the world." How would one even tell where the old stains left off and the new ones started, at this point?

Steve closed his eyes for a second, and took a deep breath, obviously trying to hold onto his temper. "You can't take responsibility for this, Tony. It's everyone's decision, not just yours."

"No," Thor said firmly. "It is my decision. And I have already decided that my answer is no."

"This is something that affects all of us," Wanda said. "It isn't just a personal family problem of yours, any more than Magneto was for me and– for me and Pietro."

Everyone seemed to be talking at once, then, raised voices overlapping and blurring into one another.

"Of course she'll stab us in the back," Hank was insisting, one hand flailing angrily through the air. "Supervillains _always_ stab you in the back. Then you're left rotting in jail for their crimes, or trying to talk them out of cloning dead Initiative members as science projects."

"If we try to blackmail or manipulate Loki into helping us without delivering payment, she's going to try and kill us all." Sam's voice, less angry than the others.

"She cannot be trusted!" Thor's shout set the dishes rattling in the cabinets. "I will not ally myself with yet another who has betrayed me. There is a limit to my forbearance!"

"I'm trying to talk to Carol, will you guys shut up?"

"Calm down, big guy." Jan laid a hand on Thor's arm, only to receive an icy glare in return. "Tony wasn't suggesting we trust her-"

"Which is what makes it such a bad idea," Steve interrupted. "If I thought you were being naïve – but you know how dangerous she is. I thought we were finished with you putting yourself in dangerous situations because you think you—"

"This isn't about me," Tony defended. The kitchen felt much too small, too loud, and none of the rest of them were _listening_. Old instincts kicked in, reminding him not to let his struggle for breath or the twinges in his chest show. _'Breathe, don't lose it, make them think there's nothing wrong with you.'_ "If Chthon breaks free and we have to fight him alone, we're doomed."

"–I don't think–"

"–you always–"

"—she has forfeited the right to my aid, and—"

"Damn it, Tony, we talked about this!"

"—how many shall die this time, through your foolhardiness?"

Tony stood up abruptly, his chair nearly toppling over – he grabbed for it, gripping the hard wooden back tightly for a moment. "I'm not doing this right now," he forced out.

The walk to the kitchen door took ages, despite the claustrophobic smallness of the room. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Steve stand, moving to follow him, saw Sam and Clint block Steve's path, Sam saying something to him in a low voice.

The words made no sense, the rushing sound in his ears turning them into meaningless, barely audible noise. The edges of his vision were blurred and grey, and suddenly he was in the hallway, leaning against the wall and trying to keep his hands from shaking, not entirely certain how he'd gotten there.

What the hell was wrong with him?

Was he having some kind of bizarre panic attack over fighting with Steve? That made no sense; this wasn't the first time they'd argued about something since Steve had come back, and if he were going to completely lose it like this, surely he would have done it weeks ago, back when he'd still been waking up each morning from dreams that Steve was still dead.

Tony closed his eyes and concentrated on breathing, pressing one hand against the ache in his chest and letting the wall hold him up. He didn't have panic attacks. He'd been blown up, tortured, shot, gone under the knife for open heart surgery, and come out the other side of all of it still perfectly able to function under pressure.

Some kind of after effect of A.I.M.'s fear toxin, activated by adrenaline? He'd been exposed to it nearly a month ago, but with A.I.M., that didn't necessarily mean anything. He should ask Hank to check him out later, to make sure he didn't have some trace amount of it still lurking in his system. Should check with Jan to make sure she hadn't experienced anything similar.

"Are you okay?"

Tony looked up with a jerk to see Jan standing a foot or so away from him, examining him intently. How had she gotten there without him hearing anything?

"I'm," he began, starting to tell her that he was fine, and then stopped. "I don't know." He drew in a deep breath, feeling marginally less shaky, and balled his hands into fists to keep them from trembling. His hands never shook. Even when he'd been drinking himself to sleep every night and hungover every morning, they'd always been rock steady when he needed them to be. "Yelling at Steve and Thor wouldn't have helped anything. I didn't want to- The last time I got into an actual fight with Steve, I broke his jaw."

Jan winced, looking away. "That was a little different than this," she said. "And I've never seen you take your anger out on someone else physically. On lab equipment maybe, but not on people."

Tony tried to smile. "I have a lot more expensive equipment than I have friends."

Jan offered him a small smile in return. "That's not saying much. I've seen your lab."

_'Calm'_, he told himself. _'You're fine. There's nothing wrong with you. There's nothing wrong with Steve. Suck it up, Shellhead, and be an Avenger, and not Tony Stark losing it because he got into a fight with his boyfriend.'_ He'd always been able to do that before, and when he couldn't, he'd known that it was time to take the armor off and give it to Rhodey.

"I think Steve can handle you arguing with him," Jan was saying. "It's good for him. And accepting Loki's help isn't out of the question as a last-ditch solution, but I don't think things are that desperate yet."

"Not yet," Tony agreed, "but we can't afford to have her as an enemy right now, either."

"I'm not sure we can afford to have her as an ally, either," Jan said. She patted him on the arm, and added, "Try to keep it together, okay? It's hard enough keeping this team functional as it is, between Thor and Hank and Carol's issues with Wanda."

"I'm fine," he said, and it wasn't entirely a lie. He could breathe easily again; the tightness and twinges in his chest had faded almost to nothing now, leaving just the faintly jittery aftermath of an adrenaline overload and a hot prickle of embarrassment.

Chthon and Loki and the threat they both represented were far more important than his personal problems, whatever those were.

There was a loud thud from inside the kitchen, probably Thor slamming a fist down on the table again, and he and Jan both jumped a little at the sound. "Let's go back inside before the big guy breaks something," Tony suggested.

Then he braced himself, put on a smile, and followed Jan back into the room.

* * *

Thor practically stomped out of the kitchen, his back a stiff, straight line. No one was completely happy with the decision the team had reached, but Thor in particular had never been inclined to compromise when he was angry.

The Avengers were not going to contact Loki, or accept her help, and under no circumstances would she be getting her spear back. However, if she contacted them, they were all going to play nice, Thor included, and do their best not to give her a reason to fight them. Tony was right about that much, at least; they couldn't afford to fight a battle on two fronts right now, not when everything they had still might not be enough to face Chthon.

He had, Steve reflected, just told a god to be on his best behavior. Thor was not likely to take kindly to that at the moment, not where Loki was involved.

Knowing that Tony's "let's talk to Loki and see what she means by 'help us'" plan had been voted down five-to-three—Wanda's vote in favor hadn't technically counted—wouldn't make the need to smile and be polite, or at least not openly hostile, the next time she appeared any easier to swallow.

"I'm just saying, it can't hurt to keep our options open." Sam watched Thor go, frowning thoughtfully. "You saw what that thing did to Dr. Strange."

Clint half-raised one hand. "I didn't, actually."

"Take my word for it," Jan said. "It was intimidating."

Which was presumably why she'd voted to accept Loki's assistance, alongside Sam and Tony. Neither her vote nor Sam's had been as surprising as Hank's resounding vote against, but when he thought about it, Steve supposed it made sense. Hank had been burned – badly – by supervillains before; Jan was nothing if not practical, the flighty persona she liked to put on notwithstanding; and Sam was more than able to grit his teeth and work with people he disliked if he thought it would serve the greater good.

Tony... Tony's arguments almost always made sense, even when they were wrong. It was his reactions just now that Steve didn't know how to interpret.

He understood storming out of a fight because you were too angry not to do or say something stupid if you stayed, but Tony hadn't looked angry when he'd left. He'd looked... strange. Upset. Steve had wondered for a half-second if he'd just been informed of some kind of disaster via the Extremis. Then he'd come back in with Jan, only a few minutes later, and appeared perfectly calm and in control. Reasonable. Willing to accept the team's decision, but with that tightness around his eyes that said he wasn't entirely happy with it.

He'd been upset, visibly so, and then he'd been fine – or had _looked_ fine. Steve had learned to tell the difference between Tony actually being calm and in control, and Tony forcing a false smile and faking it.

Tony was staring after Thor as well, eyes on the empty doorway. Nothing but a faint frown showed on his face, but his eyes held something close to the empty, damaged look they'd had just after Steve had come back. Not regret, precisely, or shame, or hurt, but some complicated combination of the three, probably with a sizable helping of guilt and self-loathing to round it out, Tony being Tony.

Hank, significantly less skilled at hiding his emotions, had left even before Thor had, storming out of the room with his head held high, determinedly not looking at the rest of them.

"You need to do something about Thor and Hank and Tony," Sam said in an undertone, following Steve's gaze to where Tony sat staring into space. Wanda sat next to him, looking as if she were debating putting one gloved hand on his arm; she seemed to wear her gloves more often since her return, even, as now, when she wasn't in costume.

"You can't tell me that fight just now wasn't about more than just Loki," Sam went on.

It was nothing Steve didn't already know, but, "Why me?" Given that he was hardly uninvolved in the situation, he doubted Thor would welcome any further interference. He'd done his best to stay neutral, and not let his feelings for Tony influence him – not when Thor had a serious and legitimate grievance – but...

Sam was right; he'd known for weeks that he was probably going to have to intervene eventually, before the team's communication problems came back to bite them in the ass in the field. He'd just hoped he wouldn't have to.

"You're in charge," Clint said, as if it were self-evident.

"I don't solve Hank's problems for him." Jan wrinkled her nose, and added, "I doubt the big guy would listen to me, anyway. I was there when the cloning happened, and I didn't do anything to stop it."

Steve would have said something to that – agreed, probably, or pointed out that Hank's problem had the potential to become everyone's problem if it led to a communications breakdown in the middle of fight – but then Tony said something quietly to Wanda and stood, moving quickly and smoothly toward the door as if he hoped to quietly slip out of the kitchen without Steve noticing.

He was probably going to go hide in the basement lab, where he would stay holed up for hours, not emerging until either Steve, Pepper, or Jarvis dragged him out.

Steve nodded distractedly at Jan and followed Tony out into the hallway.

Unsurprisingly, he was headed toward the elevator, its doors already sliding open for him accommodatingly.

"Tony."

Tony stopped, half-turning to look at Steve. "I have a project for Rhodey to work on. His new shoulder gun keeps jamming, and he wants me to-"

Steve cut him off before he could get any further with his attempt at evasion. "I need to talk to you."

Tony turned to face him fully, holding his hands up, palms out. "You're right," he said quickly. "I shouldn't have walked out of a meeting like that, informal or not. It was about Loki, not about you and me."

Steve moved closer, taking hold of Tony's wrists, and gently pulling his hands down. "That's not what I want to talk about." He hesitated, then decided to be blunt. Subtle hints rarely succeeded in getting Tony to talk about whatever was bothering him. "Are you... all right? You looked-"

"I'm fine," Tony interrupted, tugging his hands free.

Steve let go, backing off a step, and watched as Tony visibly struggled for words.

"I just..." he started, then stopped, shaking his head. "I don't like fighting with you. With Thor. Not about important things."

He might not like it, but that had never stopped him from doing it – Tony had always been willing to stick to his planned course of action with maddening stubbornness if he thought it was necessary, even when said course of action was self-destructive and morally questionable. If he truly believed that an alliance with Loki was the only way to save the world, he would walk into the cathedral and pick up the spear himself to bring it out to her. Or he would have at least kept arguing a lot longer. The near-fight in the kitchen was probably as much about Tony's ingrained habit of playing devil's advocate as anything else.

Steve had missed that, he realized. Tony had only given in when his suggestion had been officially voted down by half the team. He hadn't just conceded and agreed to go along with whatever Steve wanted. He'd visibly flinched at Thor's anger, and the accusation that his poor decisions had cost lives, but he'd looked the rest of them straight in the eyes and argued his point, without apologies.

Granted, an apology or two more to Thor might go a long way towards smoothing things over, but...

All things considered, he preferred arrogantly-sure-he-was-right, it's-all-my-responsibility-let-me-decide-FOR-you Tony to apologetic, broken Tony. It was just wrong to see Tony unsure of himself.

He didn't say that, though, not quite.

"I know," Steve told Tony. "I'm glad you did, though. You haven't told me that I'm a naïve, unrealistic boy scout in months."

Tony blinked, expression uncertain for second, then smiled. It was only a little forced. "That's because you usually aren't one. I only have to remind you that there are options you're not considering once in a while."

"When I won't consider an option, there's usually a reason for that," Steve said dryly.

"Blind stubbornness?" Tony suggested, raising his eyebrows.

"Morals," Steve said firmly. "Ethics. The Geneva Convention. Or the fact that a lot of your plans involve disturbingly high chances of you blowing up."

"That lightning the other week would not have blown me up." The elevator doors began to close, and without looking, Tony thrust a hand between them, keeping them open. "The armor's designed to handle power overloads without exploding."

"Electrocuted, then," Steve said. He stepped forward and wrapped his hand around the edge of the elevator door. "Here, I'll come down to the lab with you. Maybe I can help." Tony was unlikely to need his assistance with anything technological, but Steve wasn't going to let him hide in the basement by himself for the rest of the day. He would end up spending hours down there, not bothering to come upstairs to eat, and Steve wouldn't see him again until tomorrow night; the Avengers' labs always had a cot or sofa shoved into a corner somewhere, testament to both Tony and Hank's screwed-up working and sleeping patterns.

Tony shook his head. "I don't need any help," he said, the teasing note gone from his voice now. "Look, I have things to do. I'll be back upstairs for dinner, all right?"

Tony was still angry, obviously, even if he was making an effort to hide it. He'd never objected to Steve's presence in his lab before. "Well, I don't have things to do, so I might as well come. I can hand you tools."

"You can watch," Tony corrected. He grinned, then, as Steve followed him into the elevator. "You're just hoping I'll let you test Rhodey's shoulder cannon, aren't you?"

Steve seized on it as the olive branch it was. "You mean, hoping I'll get to fire a gun the size of Spiderman? Actually, no. I just wanted to watch you get covered in sweat and engine grease." On the other hand... "But now that you mention it..."

Tony shook his head. That momentary grin was gone, but so was the tension that had been holding his shoulders rigid. "I'm at the disassembly stage now. There won't be any playing with guns for a while. Plus, it's part of Rhodey's armor. It would be like letting someone else play with your shield."

The doors started to slide closed. Moments before they shut completely, the cat came dashing through them, a low streak of orange fur.

He rubbed his head and side blissfully against Tony's ankles as the elevator started to descend, looking up at Steve with a smug expression in his huge blue eyes. '_Mine,_' that expression said. _'I only tolerate you.'_

The cat was going to come with them to the Mansion eventually, Steve suspected. He'd only ever been Jarvis's pet in name – he slept on Steve and Tony's bed, played with Clint, and begged for food from the entire team. It had taken him about two days to figure out that Thor was a particularly soft touch.

Thor. Steve's newly regained good mood deflated a little. "You need to talk to Thor," he said quietly, the words sounding stiff and awkward to his own ears. Usually, balancing his relationship with Tony with their responsibilities as Avengers was, if not easy, then at least not especially hard. They'd reformed the team _together_, fought to end the SHRA _together_, and Steve had quietly decided that he wasn't going to let anything, be it supervillains, government interference, possession or experimental drugs, or either of their own nightmares get in the way of that again.

And he wasn't, but that didn't make trying to play peacemaker between his... lover? boyfriend? All the words he knew for it sounded silly – and one of his oldest friends any easier.

Tony's body language stiffened up again as soon as he said Thor's name. "I already did," he said, ignoring the hoarse, creaky purr that now emanated from somewhere in the vicinity of his ankles. "Apologizing again won't change what we did." He sounded resigned, tired.

Well, no, apologizing didn't undo the past, but, "Try it anyway," Steve suggested. "The way Thor sees it, an innocent man died at... not exactly his hands, but close enough that he feels dishonored by it. You know what that feels like. I've seen your face when reporters throw those questions about landmines and unexploded munitions at you."

"That's different," Tony said. "That actually is my responsibility. Just like the clone was. Thor did nothing; he just got caught in the fallout from another weapon I lost control of, one I shouldn't have allowed myself to be forced into making in the first place. And he's got just as much right to be angry at me as any of the people those landmines and missiles have hurt." He studied the smooth, polished brass of the elevator doors intently, as if searching for something in his own distorted reflection. Or avoiding Steve's eyes. "What use would another apology be when he doesn't trust my word anymore?"

So he was letting it drop, Steve guessed, waiting for Thor to slowly come around when he saw Tony being a good teammate, trying to work with him, and generally not being a mad scientist. Try hard enough, be smart enough, plan well enough, do things right, and success was inevitable – it was virtually Tony's motto, along with the assumption that if he wasn't successful, it was his fault for not foreseeing whatever had gone wrong and preventing it.

Sometimes it even worked. Maybe this would be one of those times – maybe Thor would eventually come around as Tony proved to him that his apology hadn't just been empty words.

If so, Steve hoped it happened before Chthon showed up on their doorstep.

* * *

The Avengers Mansion's white façade was entirely complete now, the late afternoon sunlight turning the pale stonework reddish-gold. From the air, the remains of the damage to the grounds were all too visible, but were it not for the crater still waiting to be filled in in the lawn and the half-dead remains of the gardens, the building itself would have looked untouched, as if it had stood there on the corner of Fifth and 70th unmolested since before the first world war.

This was actually the second time it had been rebuilt – the architects and construction company had done a very good job. How much, Carol wondered, had Tony had to bribe the Landmarks Preservation Commission in order to build an exact copy of the original building instead of some modern 'update' of it?

However much he'd spent, it had been worth it; getting the outside of the building completed in three months was nearly miraculous in New York, where scaffolding often clung to the outsides of buildings for years.

After nearly four straight hours in the air, it was a welcome sight.

Carol landed on the lawn, avoiding the crater, and turned to wave at the security camera she knew was there. If the old defense system had been back online, she would have been dodging lasers all the way to the ground, but as it was, nothing greeted her but stillness and silence. The construction crew still working on the interiors had obviously gone home for the day.

If her urgent return to the East Coast hadn't been prompted by an apparent lapse of sanity on Tony's part, she might almost have been grateful for the excuse to leave LA. The trip... hadn't gone well, though it hadn't been as bad as she had feared. She'd expected shouting and bitter fighting and that she'd leave miserable. She'd gotten the shouting in spades, but if anything she felt... slightly better for it, actually. Not better enough to want to stick around and keep doing it, but better.

Arguing with Jessica was a lot more cathartic without the worry that this would be the time Carol finally went too far and lost her for good. With less to lose, there was less to fight about.

Maybe Jessica had been right to want to call a halt to things before it stopped being fun. They had worked just fine as friends who occasionally hooked up before the SHRA had passed. And friends who were willing to forgive you some of the things Carol had pulled when she'd been drinking, and put up with the dysfunctional mess she'd been after she'd come out of the coma were harder to come by than gorgeous women with sex pheromone powers who were great in bed.

Really. She just had to keep telling herself that.

Simon had made his sappily sweet fling with Henry Hellrung official shortly before Carol's first trip back East, the one that had ended in poison gas attacks and mass hysteria. Apparently, she and Jessica couldn't compete with the seductive power inherent in Hellrung's encyclopedic command of classic cinema, and Simon had amicably ended their relationship in favor of living in domestic bliss with the Disney Channel version of Tony Stark.

Carol had started spending a lot of time in New York, then. She and Jessica argued more without Simon and his dislike of emotional conflict there to smooth things over, and make-up sex might be deeply satisfying, but it only went so far toward patching things up again after they'd both said things they regretted.

Jessica and Simon had been the first of Carol's lovers in a long time whom she could allow herself to get a little rough with, whom she didn't have to worry about accidentally hurting, but there were more ways to hurt someone than simply leaving too many bruises during over-enthusiastic sex.

They'd argued again this time, despite the lower stakes, over Wanda's return and Simon's refusal to come back to New York and see her. Hellrung was all for facing down your problems with a positive attitude, or at least with long-suffering endurance. Jessica, for once, had been in total agreement with him – she'd kept enough secrets in the rest of her life to prefer brutal honesty in relationships, she'd said.

Brutal honesty, Carol had learned, was a lot easier to dish out than it was to listen to.

Someone had needed to stick up for Simon. Jessica hadn't been there when Vision had died, when Wanda had tried to destroy them all. She didn't really understand how personal the betrayal had to be for Simon, who'd lost his entire remaining family in a single day. She thought he ought to be happy to have Wanda back, didn't see Wanda's madness as any different than what the Shadow King had done to her.

_"She didn't choose it, Carol, anymore than you chose what Rogue did to you. Anymore than I chose to be his pawn and his plaything._"

Vision, Scott, and Clint hadn't chosen to die, either, and Clint hadn't chosen to have sex with Wanda. Jessica, of all people, should have understood that. She knew what mind-control was like, what it was like to have your choices taken away from you. _Wanda_ was not the person one ought to be feeling sorry for here.

No one answered when Carol rang the doorbell, but knowing Tony, he was just as likely to be walled up in some soundproof workshop, completely oblivious to anything that wasn't either mechanical or electronic.

She could come back later. It would give her a chance to shower, change clothes, relax for a while after hours of flying. She could sit around with Jan and rant about exes who thought they knew what was best for you and were distractingly sexy when they were angry. Jan had dated Tony once, so she ought to have experience in that department.

Or she could just let herself in. She hadn't flown at top speed all the way from LA to wait around for Tony to make room in his schedule for her. He had to have some rational justification for why he thought it was a good idea to accept help from supervillains after they'd just finished fixing the mess from the last time they'd done so, and she couldn't wait to hear it.

Complying with the SHRA had been necessary, both as the only viable way to exercise some degree of damage control, and because refusing to obey legitimate government legislation would have only made the public perception of superhumans worse – as the anti-Registration side's resistance, in fact, had.

Loki was not a representative of the US government, or anyone else they had any reason to respect, and had in point of fact tried to kill them all more than once. Trusting Wanda and letting her back onto the team – probationary Carol's ass, she was pretty much on the team again – was bad enough without accepting help from the overtly, self-admittedly evil.

She'd said as much to Clint, on the phone, but she doubted he'd relayed more than the barest gist of her words to the others. Probably just, "Ms. Marvel votes no, and she thinks you're crazy."

Carol pressed her thumb against the tiny biometric lock tucked discreetly into the corner of the door frame, and waited while it analyzed her fingerprint and possibly her DNA. After a moment, the door unlocked with an audible click, and for the first time in over a year, she was inside the Avengers Mansion.

There was no furniture in the front hall, but the staircase and the marble floor were the same. Untouched, this time, with no sign of the crack in the floor where Thor had once dropped his hammer, the uneven spots in the plasterwork where scratches and gouges had been filled in and painted over innumerable times. The smell of fresh paint and dry plaster dust was everywhere.

Her boots were loud against the bare marble floor, and louder still on the living room's wooden floorboards.

There was no one in there, either, but a fire had been laid in the fireplace, and either Steve or Tony had left a book lying on the coffee table, face down to keep their place in it.

_The Maltese Falcon_. It had been one of Vision's favorite books, she remembered, with a pang. He'd loved film noir and pulp detective novels, anything with trench coats and fedoras and hardboiled private eyes.

Carol frowned. Steve preferred the movie version of Sam Spade to the more ruthless and less soulful-eyed original, and Tony preferred his manly pulp novels to be of the James Bond variety.

There was a soft sound behind her, someone's shoes scuffing against the floor.

Carol turned sharply, feeling a flash of guilty embarrassment at being caught snooping through Steve or Tony's reading material.

"Wanda!" She felt her face heat, and hated it. Damn it, Wanda was staying here, too. How could she have forgotten?

"Carol," Wanda said, moving into the room. At least she looked uneasy, too. She was in civilian clothing, in dark colors, and her gloves were missing. The spiky black tattoos on the backs of her hands stood out in sharp relief, like a Shi-ar's facial markings.

She must have realized that Carol was staring, because after a moment, she pulled her hands back, letting the folds of her skirt hide them.

"They're not here," Wanda said, stiffly. "Cap and Tony are both out."

"Maybe you can explain what on earth Tony was thinking, then." It wasn't what she had intended to say – talking to Wanda at all was something she would prefer to avoid – but irritation overrode her better instincts, as it did too often. She had spent a good portion of her flight planning out exactly what she was going to say to Tony, one version for if she was able to get him alone, and another in case Steve was present; she hadn't wanted to call him on the carpet for poor decision-making in front of their team leader, boyfriend or no. Not unless it was necessary.

Wanda looked up, then, meeting her eyes levelly. "He was thinking the same thing I was," she said. "That Chthon may be too powerful for us to defeat on our own, should he break free, and that Loki is significantly less likely to try to destroy reality itself than Chthon is."

"That's the last thing I expected to hear from you," Carol told her. "If Strange is right, I'd think you would have had enough of evil chaos deities."

Wanda crossed her arms, the fabric of her blouse wrinkling, and said stiffly, "There's evil, and there's Chthon."

"Yes," Carol said. "And once upon a time, you wouldn't have sided with evil."

"I was a member of the Brotherhood of Mutants long before I was an Avenger."

Which was technically true, but, "That's not the same thing, and you know it."

"No." Wanda's voice was flat. "Siding with Magneto was my choice, even if it was a bad one."

And being possessed by Chthon hadn't been. However, exactly how much control Wanda had had over her actions while possessed was unclear – how much of what she'd done had been Chthon's influence, and how much had been her own subconscious desires? Or conscious ones?

_'No more mutants.'_

Who wished an entire group of people into extinction? How could you ever trust someone whose mind had harbored such a wish?

Carol folded her own arms, realized she was mirroring Wanda's body language, and unfolded them. "Lots of us have had our choices taken away," she said. "Most of us didn't kill people over it, or try to destroy the world." At the words, all of the anger she had felt at the time came back. The paperback she'd guiltily set back down on the coffee table stood out with painful clarity, the garish cover shouting the title in bright, block letters. Vision had died, if not precisely by Wanda's hands, then through her magic, and now she was sitting right there in the very building she'd destroyed, reading his favorite book. There was something obscene about it, and Carol felt a sudden urge to snatch the book away and take it back to LA with her, to give it to Simon, who had far more right to Vision's memory than the person responsible for his death.

She narrowed her eyes at Wanda. "Tony feels guilty about what happened to you. He's clearly overcompensating. Thor wasn't here to see what you did. Steve forgives everyone, eventually." Even Tony, who had fought with him so bitterly. Even Sharon Carter, who had shot him – not intentionally, true, but a lot of men wouldn't have seen past the fact of the bullet. "But I don't understand Clint forgiving you. Not after what you did to him. I don't see how he can stand to be in the same room as you." That, even more then the rest of this, made no sense. In her experience, men were more likely to shrug off being taken sexual advantage of than women were; she'd known at least a half a dozen guys in the Air Force who'd had sex they didn't remember while drunk, and the greatest source of trauma – that they'd admitted to, anyway – seemed to be the women involved's lack of perceived attractiveness. But Clint had been visibly upset, when he'd told her about it, afraid he'd taken advantage of Wanda, blaming himself for not resisting, for not bringing her back with him. And yet he hadn't said a word against allowing her to come back.

"That's between me and Clint." Wanda's voice rose sharply as she spoke, the words sounding strained, defensive, as if she truly felt guilty. Good. She ought to. "I brought him back as soon as I could. He's one of my oldest friends—do you think I wouldn't do anything to be able to do the same with Vision?"

Carol looked away from Wanda's tight, set face, and the suspicious shine in her eyes, to the living room's bare floors, their finish still glossy and untouched. "Yeah, you cared about them so much that you tried to kill them to, what, punish us for the fact that you lost your children? Was that how Chthon got you to do it?" Wanda flinched, her shoulders hunching up defensively, but Carol pressed on, almost glad to be hurting the other woman. "You got inside our heads! You used our worst weaknesses against us. Chthon couldn't have known those things." Making Jen lose control of her powers, shoving Tony off the wagon; those were personal attacks, the kind of thing someone did when they wanted to hurt someone they knew well as badly as possible. It would have made no sense for Chthon to have attacked the Avengers that way – they were nothing but pawns to him. Using Wanda's powers to slaughter them all without the cat-toying-with-a-mouse build up would have been more efficient.

And yet no one else seemed to see that. Even Simon didn't want to believe it, though in his case, she could understand why. Better to believe that Vision's death had been due entirely to some external force than to any part of the woman he and Vision had both loved. At least that way he could keep his memories of both of them untainted – which was, she suspected, part of the reason he was so reluctant to see Wanda now.

Wanda's hands were balled into fists now, her back stiff and her eyes glittering. She stared at Carol with her chin up, jaw set as if she were bracing herself for a blow. Carol wasn't going to give her the satisfaction – if nothing else, she would probably break Wanda's jaw if she let herself hit her, and it would probably get her kicked off the team again. And even if it didn't, beating an unarmed woman who didn't have superstrength would be the actions of a bully, and Carol wasn't going to sink that low.

"I didn't do it on purpose!" Wanda's voice was rough, almost shrill. "Clint knows that. Tony and Cap know that. I've tried to tell Simon, but he won't talk to me – your girlfriend hung up on me when I called."

Good for Jessica. That must have been before she'd decided that Simon needed to hear what Wanda had to say.

The core of the Avengers, the ones who'd been on the team the longest – Steve, Tony, Hank, Jan, Thor, Clint, Wanda – always got extra leeway with one another. It wasn't surprising, given how long they'd known each other, but it wasn't always a good thing, either. If Carol had pulled half the things Hank had... Or Tony, who seemed to go out of his way to fuck himself over. And yet they'd both been forgiven, just as Wanda had. On the other hand, neither of them had killed a teammate, though Hank had apparently come close.

Carol had never been able to stay on a team long enough to earn that – first there was Marcus, then she'd lost her Binary powers and had to leave the Starjammers, and then she'd fucked up her shot at the Avengers again with the drinking, and then she left the Avengers to work for the government once she'd earned her slot back. And she'd enjoyed the work, before the SHRA started, but... On the other hand, if she'd been given that kind of easy forgiveness, she might still be drinking. Or maybe they'd all have put up more of a fight to stop her from going off with Marcus.

Thank god Wanda and Chthon hadn't used those particular memories against her. They could have, so easily. If the whole thing had gone on a little longer, another of Marcus's dopplegangers might even have shown up, drawn there by deliberately created bad luck and altered chance.

She stabbed a finger at Wanda, and had the satisfaction of seeing her flinch back. "How can we ever trust you again? I get hauled off to another dimension by a rapist and no one lifts a finger, but they welcome you back with open arms? You should be locked up somewhere where you can't hurt anybody else," she spat, "not back on the team."

Wanda's eyes narrowed. "I was locked up!" she shouted. "On Mount Wundagore, for months. I'm still locked up now." She brandished her tattooed hands, all but waving them in Carol's face. "What do you think these are? Locks, on my power, to keep me from drawing enough to let Chthon take me again. To keep me safe."

"Safe," Carol repeated. "You mean, like Strange was safe?" Even at her worst, even when she'd been drinking, her problems had never caused anyone else to be hurt. She had come close once or twice, avoiding it only by luck – Tony could have been injured badly, that time she'd thrown him through the wing of a plane, or the airliner itself could have crashed – but nothing like the trail of collateral damage Wanda's possession by Chthon was leaving, even now.

Wanda shook her head sharply. "I didn't mean for that to happen! I thought if I went to Strange, I'd be safe, that he had enough power to defend himself if Chthon took me over again. I didn't want any of this. The last thing I remember is going to find Jen, and Cap says that was weeks before everything else happened. I was under Chthon's control for months, without anyone noticing, just like Tony and Immortus. Do you think I _wanted_ that? That I wanted Agatha to die, or Scott, or Vi-vision." She stumbled over Vision's name, and looked away, eyes going to the coffee table. "I wanted someone to stop me," she said, more quietly. "I asked Xavier to, and he wouldn't." For a moment, she sounded almost bitter, but then her shoulders slumped slightly, and her voice just sounded tired as she added, "We never seem to notice when one of us needs help."

_No,_ Carol thought. _And when we do notice, and we usually manage to make things worse._ The way Tony had when he'd gotten her kicked off the team over the drinking problem she'd barely even had yet. _Or we try when it's too late._

"You're right," she said. "We didn't notice that anything was wrong until it was too late. This time we already know you're compromised. This time, if anything happens, it will be our fault for letting our guard down."

"Fine!" Wanda's hands made an angry slashing motion. "Do that. I want you to do that! The others all treat me like I'm either a victim or a timebomb, but none of them would do anything about it if I needed to be taken out. None of them could."

Carol raised her eyebrows. "Don't underestimate Tony. Or Hank. It would destroy them, but they'd do it."

"That," Wanda snapped. "That's why we considered an alliance with Loki. Because sometimes things you know could destroy you are worth it. Sometimes you need to do what's necessary even if it might hurt you."

_'Like wipe your species off the face of the earth?'_ "I know. I've done that. It ended up with Steve dead and Tony suicidal and half of us hating the other half." Carol narrowed her eyes and pointed at Wanda. "Tell Tony I want to talk to him," she added, grimly.

"Fine. I will." Wanda stepped aside, pointedly moving out of the path to the door. "Don't break the door on your way out."

Carol didn't – in fact, she made an effort to shut the front door as gently as possible, before flying away to find something acceptable to hit.


	7. Chapter 7

**Chapter Seven**

The last of the victims infected with the symbiote virus had just been sprayed with Hank's antidote and subdued when a fresh group of people climbed the steps out of the 59th Street subway station, several of them with shopping bags from earlier in the morning already in their hands.

_*I thought the subway was being shut down,*_ Tony snapped over the police and emergency personnel frequencies he'd accessed via the Extremis. _*Are the MTA shutting the subway down or not?*_ There were times when he hated trying to coordinate things with city authorities, especially now that he no longer had the authority of SHIELD to back him.

Most of the time, the city's police and emergency departments coped surprisingly well with supervillains, but there were times, like now, when the wheels of city bureaucracy turned much too slowly.

_*Affirmative, Stark, the 59th Street and Lexington station is being shut down. All available units between Central Park South and Times Square, report to 59th and Lexington. Acknowledge.*_

Tony tuned the radio chatter out as ambulances began reporting in, and gave his full attention to the two men and three women who had just exited the subway station, all of them writhing convulsively as sticky black goo began oozing over their skin. His helmet's air filters kept all foreign particles out, but if he'd taken it off, he knew the air would be heavy with the thick, cloying scent of cotton candy and burned sugar that always surrounded the Venom symbiote.

"Just stay calm, people." Steve stepped forward, raising the shield he had lowered when the last of the previous victims had slumped to the ground, fully human again. "You've been infected with an airborne toxin. Just stay still, and we'll get you the antidote." The breathing mask over his face muffled his voice, but he still managed to project calm authority.

The woman on the left dropped her Museum of Natural History giftshop bag onto the pavement, a pair of stuffed dinosaurs spilling out of it, and turned on Steve, hissing. The last few square inches of dark brown skin visible on her face disappeared beneath a wave of oily black, and eight inches of tongue lolled out of her mouth, twisting in midair like a snake's.

The two men were the last to succumb, their greater body mass buying them an extra half-second of cognizance – the older one, a white man with thinning hair and one of those omnipresent paint-splatter sweatshirts all the tourist shops sold, screamed hysterically as black goo crawled up his torso, the sound raw and grating.

As he stepped forward to seize the nearest victim by the arms, Tony spared a moment to be grateful that it was a weekday, and the city schools were in session at this time of year. Hank's antidote worked as well on children as adults, but subduing a child in order to spray anti-toxin in its face was far, far down on the list of things Tony ever wanted to do.

The woman struggled and clawed at him, preternaturally strong, but unskilled and completely out of control, and for a moment, he was back in the dining room of the Meridian, trying to prevent desperate, fear-crazed people from killing one another and unable to use his armor at more than a fraction of its capacity. The tiniest misjudgment could kill someone, break their neck, burn holes through them, and then the sticky-sugar smell his helmet was sealing out would be replaced by scorched meat.

The woman bucked violently, ripping herself free of his hold, and grabbed him by the throat, just below the bottom edge of his helmet – stupid, so stupid, letting himself get distracted that way – and then he was airborne.

Something hard slammed into his back, and bright lights flashed in his head.

Time lurched, like a DVD freezing and then skipping forwards. He was lying on the ground, the world at a 90-degree angle. Steve was charging at the woman, shield raised. Beyond him, Carol was struggling with the larger of the two men, arm locked around his neck in a hold that would have immobilized any normal human; the newly created symbiote howled and lashed out at her with sticky black pseudopods, pulling at the breathing mask on her face. Clint was pinned to the ground by a mass of writhing black, an impossibly wide, toothy jaw snapping at his throat.

Tony struggled to get up, struggled to _breathe_, his chest a tight knot of pain. For an endless moment, his lungs refused to work, and then he managed to suck in a shallow, ragged breath. The sharp, suffocating pain was immediately cut in half.

He shook his head, trying to force the high-pitched ringing noise out of his ears, and reached out for the bent remains of the lamppost he had hit, his gauntlet clinking dully against the metal. The armor's damage reports scrolled through his head as he pulled himself upright; it was barely dented.

Old Shellhead was a lot tougher than he was. He'd expended a lot of time and effort making it that way.

As he let go of the post and stepped toward the fight again, a tiny black shape dove for the man Carol was restraining. A cloud of white mist surrounded his head and shoulders, and then Jan was darting upwards again, easily evading the man's attempts to grab her with hands and prehensile tongue.

_*Those tongues were disgusting the last time we fought these things, and they're still disgusting,*_ Jan muttered via the comlink.

_*I think they get worse with repeated exposure,*_ Clint said. _*Fuck, someone get this thing the hell _off _me. Falcon? Falcon, it's licking me. Spray it already!*_

Steve hit one of the venom symbiotes in the face with his shield, sending it reeling back into Tony's waiting hands. He locked eyes with Tony over the thing's head for a fraction of a second, his gaze flicking from Tony to the bent lamppost, then turned away to help Clint. His hand latched onto the thing's shoulder – or what Tony thought was its shoulder – and yanked it backwards just in time to keep Clint's face intact.

The thing's jaws snapped shut on empty air, and then Sam dropped from the sky and hit it full-force, the momentum of the impact knocking it away from Clint. Sam thrust the canister of antidote in its face, only to be brought up short as its tongue wrapped around his wrist.

Tony tightened his grip on the violently struggling woman in his arms, ignoring the lingering dizziness and raw ache in his lungs that made each breath an effort. Jan was there like magic, probably evidence that he still wasn't tracking completely straight, and then the woman went limp, the black coating melting away to reveal a torn and rumpled business suit and short blonde hair spiky with the remains of the dissolving symbiote-substance.

It wasn't alive, unlike the real Venom and Carnage symbiotes, but a byproduct of the toxin, which contained protein compounds from one of the symbiotes as well as a cocktail of biological and chemical agents. It was a nasty piece of work, originally designed by Doom as a contact poison and refined by A.I.M. into a more easily controllable airborne compound that entered the body via the respiratory tract.

_*Can you hurry it up up there, Goldilocks?*_ Jan asked, tone closer to an order than a question. _*That was the last of my antidote.*_

"But a moment more, and the vapors shall disperse." Thor didn't bother to use the comlink, his voice carrying easily over the noise of the fight and the drone of his spinning hammer even without it.

Tony lowered the unconscious woman gently to the ground, beside Carol's man and the limp form of the woman with the museum bag, looked up just in time to see Sam's canister of antidote hit the sidewalk with a clank.

Sam was beating at the symbiote with his wings and free hand both, yanking violently on the tongue still wrapped around his wrist. Steve punched it in the kidneys, a hard jab that Tony could tell he pulled only slightly, and it howled, but kept its hands firmly locked around Sam's throat.

Clint had pushed himself to his feet, his hand moving automatically to his shoulder as if he were reaching for the quiver he wasn't wearing; he'd left the arrows in the quinjet, joking that the last thing he wanted was to be stabbed with one of his own weapons again.

The antidote skidded across the pavement, rolling toward the curb. Tony reached for it, and nearly overbalanced as the ground lurched under him. The canister skittered away from his fingers, his hands clumsy as they'd rarely been even when he'd been drinking. What the hell was wrong with him? He hadn't hit the lamppost hard enough to have a real concussion; he'd only been out for a few seconds.

He gritted his teeth and reached for it again, only to have it snatched out of his grasp by a blur of brown and white feathers.

With a harsh scream, Redwing launched himself into the air and dropped the canister into Carol's waiting hands. She sprayed it, covering Steve, Sam, and the sole remaining artificial symbiote indiscriminately with a white chemical mist, and the symbiote shuddered and went limp, gradually transforming back into a middle-aged tourist in a garish sweatshirt.

For a moment, everyone just stood there. Steve still held himself as if ready for an attack, whole body a study in coiled tension. Beside him, Sam rubbed at his throat with one hand, wincing.

Redwing landed on the unconscious man's chest, eyeing him first with one baleful golden eye, then the other; Tony wasn't sure if it was general suspicion, confusion over the fact that the monster of moments before was gone, or vengeful wrath because the man had tried to hurt Sam.

After a few long moments during which all of the victims of the toxin failed to move, Tony let himself relax, hunching forward to ease the ache in his lungs. Hank's antidote really did work, it seemed, even if the part of him that had seen one too many horror movies kept expecting one of the men or women who had been affected to suddenly sit up and try to bite someone.

His back throbbed hotly where he'd hit the lamppost; it was probably going to bruise. The armor made rubbing at the injury a useless gesture, but he did it anyway. Steve would probably tell him that bruises would remind him to pay more attention to the fight next time, and he'd be right. If he hadn't been wearing the armor, he could have broken his back.

"Is everyone all right?" Steve asked, looking first to Sam, then Tony.

"No," Clint grumbled. He rubbed at the exposed parts of his face with one glove, trying to scrape off the saliva that covered it. "I nearly had my face bitten off. And I've got its spit all over me."

Sam swallowed. "I'm fine," he said, voice hoarse. He held up one wrist, and Redwing hopped up from his perch atop the unconscious man to land heavily on it, talons digging into Sam's thick leather glove.

"The city's going to want me to pay for that lamppost," Tony said. It wasn't an actual answer, but he wasn't sure he could give one right now. He wasn't actually injured, beyond the bruises, but there was definitely _something_ wrong with him. Maybe he'd hit the lamppost harder than he'd thought.

The Extremis had healed his body completely when he acquired it, erasing all the old damage. A new heart to replace the mechanical one, a new liver to replace the one he'd tried to destroy, new lungs to take the place of ones scarred by pneumonia and damaged by years of improper bloodflow. His body could be injured, or worn out by too little sleep or too much stress, but he didn't get sick anymore, couldn't suffer from any kind of cumulative damage, except, apparently, for damage to the Extremis itself. He'd barely been using the Extremis during the fight, though, so it had to be the impact.

There ought to be some way to increase the armor's ability to absorb kinetic force. Steve's shield's ability to do the same was an inherent property of vibranium and thus not replicable, but there were other things he could do. Force shields were too much of an energy drain, but maybe...

Sam turned to stare at the damaged lamppost, his eyebrows going up. "If it had been one of the old, wrought-iron ones, it wouldn't have bent like that."

"My armor's a titanium-steel alloy. It would still have bent."

The whine of Thor's spinning hammer abruptly ceased, and Thor landed in the middle of the street with a thud Tony could feel in his bones. "The last of the vapors have dispersed. The air is once more safe to breathe."

The others immediately pulled their masks off, Jan returning to full size after she did so.

"Good work, guys," she said. "Who wants to stay and talk to the police and the press?" The Doppler sound of an ambulance siren nearly drowned out the end of her sentence, as the first of the crews of paramedics arrived, swerving carefully around Thor to pull up next to the curb.

Carol took a half-step forward. "I can do it; I don't mind talking to reporters."

Steve didn't even bother to volunteer – he and Sam were already talking to the ambulance crew. As Tony watched, he gestured to the fallen pedestrians with one hand, saying, "Some of them may have minor injuries. We tried to be careful when we restrained them, but—"

"It was like that fear toxin thing all over again, huh?" the EMT asked. He folded his skinny frame down to peer at one of the victims, frowning, then turned to his partner. "DeSoto, can I get some help with a stretcher?"

Tony opened a link to Steve's com unit, making sure to broadcast just to him. _*I'll see you back at the Tower. Hank will want a report on how his antidote worked.*_ And Tony needed to go sit down somewhere before he keeled over in front of a bunch of emergency workers and in sight of at least two news helicopters, not to mention most of his teammates.

The dizziness and pain were fading, but he still felt shaky, and while he could put on a smile for reporters while far more seriously injured than this, the others more than had this one covered. They didn't need Tony here to pose for the cameras.

Steve turned to smile at him, that recruitment-poster perfect grin that always made Tony want to smile back, even when he couldn't. There was a tear through the leather fabric of his pants, halfway up his right thigh, but he looked otherwise untouched by the chaos of the past twenty minutes. From the easy set of his shoulder and the open happiness in that smile, he was pleased with the fight's outcome.

He ought to be; they had been lucky today, despite Tony's slip-up. No one had been seriously hurt, not even the people affected by the toxin. A.I.M., unfortunately, had used a timed smoke bomb to release the formula into the air, so they'd been denied the dubious pleasure of helping the police arrest Headcase twice in one month, but compared to A.I.M.'s last poison gas attack, this one had been easy. Should have been easy, if he hadn't been so tired, hadn't let himself get distracted.

The gas main explosion three days ago had _not_ been easy, and the subway accident yesterday had been an ugly, messy disaster all around – the Avengers hadn't been called in on that one, but it had been the top news item on every local news feed Tony had open until half an hour ago, when the venom symbiotes rampaging down Lexington Avenue had replaced it. Keeping all the datafeeds open made his head ache, the stab of pain over his left eye a familiar presence by now, but it was necessary.

Spiderman claimed to have broken up twice as many muggings in the past week as usual, and according to Luke Cage and Daredevil, there'd been an increase in domestic violence incidents throughout Hell's Kitchen, with the worst of the fights taking place the closest to St. Margaret's Cathedral. Chthon's presence was poisoning the city, slowly but surely.

They needed to stay on the ball. And they needed to keep public confidence in superheroes high, or the tension caused by Chthon and the apparently steadily increasing power leakage from spear would find a new outlet.

Tony hadn't sacrificed his integrity, his reputation, half his friendships, and far too many people's lives to have anti-superhuman sentiment break out all over again. Not when they'd finally managed to turn the tide of public opinion and get Registration repealed.

"I don't think I like this new A.I.M.," Clint commented. "It used to take MODOK at least a week to get his plans in motion after a jailbreak."

"That's because MODOK had plans," Tony said. With his helmet on, he didn't have to try to cover his exhaustion or add animation to his voice – the helmet's voice modulators covered a multitude of sins. "I'm not sure Maddigan does." A.I.M. had never had much in the way of discernible goals, aside from the pursuit of ever-fancier ways to destroy things via cutting edge science, but lately their plans had been even more random than usual, as if they'd switched from the pursuit of knowledge and weapons development at all cost to pure promotion of anarchy for anarchy's sake.

"He doesn't," Carol said. "Jessica's done some digging on him – he's pretty much A.I.M.'s puppet, more of a figurehead than an actual leader. Whatever they did to him to keep him, well, alive's as good a term as any... his sanity didn't come through the experience intact. Not that he was all that sane to begin with," she added.

"We weren't great at plans, when we were his age." Clint shrugged one shoulder. "I don't know. I think you and Spiderwoman should keep an eye on him. Sanity is optional for supervillains." He glanced back over his shoulder to where Thor and Jan were talking to two uniformed policemen and a woman with a microphone and a plastic smile. "Jan's waving at you," he added. "I think you're on deck."

Carol ran one hand through her hair, and tugged her sagging left glove back up her arm. "Reporters aren't really that hard to talk to, you know. It's all in how you spin it. You just have to be careful what you let them see." She strode towards the camera confidently, the two-inch heels of her boots striking hard against the pavement. Tony had seen runway models display less poise.

"Are you waiting to go back with the Quinjet, or do you want a lift back to the tower?" he asked, turning to Clint.

Clint shook his head slightly. "Considering how lovey-dovey it looks when any of you guys fly while carrying someone, and considering the camera crews right over there and how much fun the media had debating whether or not you'd ever slept with Henry Hellrung, I think I'll wait for the Quinjet."

Even after years' worth of experience trying to manage his public image, there were still moments when the need to constantly worry over what the media would think got extremely annoying. Especially when other people worried about it for him. "Just because you know those rumors are true doesn't mean the rest of the country doesn't think they were all baseless tabloid speculation," Tony said, not bothering to keep the irritation from his voice. It survived the voice modulation loud and clear. "No one will think you've caught slutty bisexual cooties from me."

"Wait, they're true? You and Simon's new boyfriend actually-" Clint made a vague hand gesture that could have encompassed anything from sex to Parcheesi.

"According to reliable sources." Tony had been drinking heavily enough by that point that he didn't remember much, beyond the fact that he'd thought Henry's initial greeting – "Hi, I'm Henry Hellrung, and I'm going to be playing you on television," – had been a clever joke.

"That's creepy."

Tony rolled his eyes, secure in the knowledge that no one could see his face. "There are times when you're even less mature than Spiderman, Hawkeye." He probably should have been amused by it; people had been reacting to his sex life with everything from envy to disgust since he'd been seventeen. He didn't feel like being amused; his head hurt, his chest hurt, and reporters were starting to cast glances in their direction.

He sent one more silent status update to Steve's communicator, and fired his boot jets.

* * *

Steve studied the image on the screen in front of him; the security camera still was blurry and pixilated, but he didn't need to see the woman in the picture's face to recognize her. The way she held herself, the gun she carried, the knife strapped to the outside of her thigh would have been enough even without the blurred glimpse of curly hair.

He didn't need to look to Sharon for confirmation – which begged the question; why had Nick actually called him to the Helicarrier today? Sharon, too, would have known the woman's identity as soon as she saw her, making Steve's ID unnecessary.

"Sin," he said. "It's definitely her. And at least one of the men she had with her when she attacked Bucky and Sharon – you can see part of his arm just inside the frame, there."

"Oh, we knew that," Nick said. "She left three men alive at the third installation she attacked. I didn't call ya up here for an identification. I was hopin' ya might have some idea of what the hell it is she wants." He stabbed an unlit cigar at the picture, using it like a pointer. "That was taken four days ago, at a SHIELD R&amp;D facility in Jersey. Everyone in the facility was killed. We kept it off the news, and the same for the one before that, but we're not goin' to be able to keep last night's attack quiet. Which comin' on top of getting a Helicarrier blown to hell and gone last spring, is going to have Washington on our necks. Again. We need answers, people."

Bucky shrugged one shoulder – the right one, the one that was still flesh and blood. "She wants revenge. It's not complicated; we killed Crossbones, and his death wasn't pretty, or easy." The dark circles that had still smudged his eyes the last time Steve had seen him were gone; he looked fully recovered from the snake venom now, and though there were probably still bandages hiding under his clothing, you couldn't tell it from the way he moved. Seeing him now did a little to ease the memory of him leaning on Sharon, his side covered in blood, but not enough. It had taken half an hour for Steve to get all the blood off the kitchen table, counter, and floor. They had thrown the ruined, blood-stained dishtowel away.

Nick gave him a flat look. "Yeah, but why now? And why bother with those men when it's the people right here in this room that she wants? Little Miss Crazy's always been the impulsive type. These attacks are targeted, planned. Without Daddy to hold her leash, who's givin' her orders?"

"The voices in her head," Sharon muttered. Then, slightly louder and with significantly less sarcasm, "When she fought us, she kept saying, 'You killed me, you killed Brock, I'll make you pay,' over and over. She may not have any endgame beyond causing as much damage to SHIELD as possible, and with James up here recovering from her poison, any SHIELD employee might do as a temporary substitute."

"It's a little more complicated than that." Nick slid three pieces of paper across the conference table, one to each of them. "This is a transcript of her conversation with one of the men she very pointedly didn't kill last night. The part that starts with 'We are coming for ya, Fury,' is particularly interesting."

"Like I said," Nick went on, as Steve took the paper and quickly scanned its contents, "we know she wants revenge. What we need to know is what she thinks she's doing, and who she's doin' it for."

The transcript had several lines of asterisk symbols scattered through it, where portions of the conversation had not been picked up by the microphone, but the important part had been perfectly audible.

_"We are coming for you, Fury. For you, and for Barnes, and Rogers, and Carter. You will pay for the good men you have killed, and the plans you have ruined. The Red Skull is coming for you. Daddy and I are going to make you all beg for mercy before you die."_

God damnit, they had _killed_ Red Skull. Even dead twice over, he was still reaching out from his well-deserved grave to try and destroy people Steve loved.

What hold had he had over Sin, that she would carry on fighting for his warped cause even after his death, to the point where she tried to _become_ the father who had used and tortured and brainwashed her?

Unless... Steve shoved the thought away. Sin couldn't have meant that bit about 'Daddy and I' literally. Red Skull was dead. He had to be dead.

"Interesting." Sharon's voice was serious, with the slightest hint of something that might have been skepticism, or might have been unease. "She's probably delusional, but... when Red Skull was killed the first time, everyone in this room saw his corpse. SHIELD autopsied it. I touched it. And then he showed up in Alexander Lukin's body."

Nick gestured with his unlit cigar, the motion encompassing all of them. "I want your honest opinion. Do you think there's any chance that she's not just talkin' metaphors? That Red Skull really is still around somehow, and in contact with her?"

"No," Sharon was shaking her head. "The first time he died, the cosmic cube was right there. He was able to use it to transfer his consciousness. The second time, there was no way for him to escape. We checked Lukin's body; the cube wasn't there."

Steve was tempted to agree with her – surely even the Red Skull only got so many opportunities to cheat death – but there had been those last few moments before his second, final death when Lukin had been in control of his body again. Had approaching death given him the strength to seize control from Red Skull one last time, or had Red Skull already been gone? It was a question that had haunted Steve, at first, but as the summer had passed without any sign that Red Skull's death had been anything other than permanent, he had let himself relax, let himself believe, finally, that the Red Skull was truly dead and gone.

"It wouldn't be the first time he's cheated death," he said, reluctantly. "It does seem unlikely, though."

Bucky frowned down at the note in his hand, the paper white against stainless steel fingers. The black SHIELD uniform had finally stopped making him look like a stranger, but Steve would never grow entirely used to that metal arm, or lose the faint twinge of guilt he felt whenever he saw it.

"Lukin spoke to me, before I killed him," Bucky said, slowly. "He asked me to shoot him quickly, to let him die as himself. I thought – I hoped – I was killing both of them. But Lukin was the one I saw when I looked into his eyes." He swore in Russian, crumpling the print-out into a ball. "How many times do I have to kill him?"

"I've been asking myself that for years," Steve said. He had never like killing people, had hoped never to have to do it again, after the war had ended, but for the Red Skull, he'd always been more than willing to make an exception. Red Skull had earned death multiple times over, before the end, but had always seemed to escape it at the last moment, generally leaving a trail of innocent corpses in his wake.

"Damnit," Nick muttered. "I really want to believe she's just looney tunes. If she's not, this just got a whole lot worse."

"Oh, she's that, too." Bucky made a face. "She really enjoys torturing people. Really, really enjoys it. Most people don't, not really, or if they do, it's the power they enjoy, not the opportunity to lick somebody else's blood off their fingers."

Sharon shook her head, a wisp of blonde hair that had escaped her tight ponytail falling into her face. "Does it really matter if it's her or him? Our people are just as dead either way. And either way, she won't stop until we capture her or kill her."

They were all talking about killing just a little too easily, Steve thought. That was what fighting the Red Skull did to you, even if it wasn't necessarily him anymore. "The Avengers have a lot on our plate at the moment," he said, hating the necessity of it. Chthon was a worse threat than Sin, even if the Red Skull _was_ still present somehow. His own personal stake in the matter didn't change that. "I can't leave the team right now, not even for this. Not unless Sin starts spreading her attacks beyond SHIELD. But if you need me-"

"Don't worry," Nick said, with a familiar wolfish grin. "I'll let you know."

Sharon met his gaze, her eyes solemn; Steve suspected that she, too, was remembering listening to Bucky wheeze while the snake venom shut down his lungs. "So will we," she said, and it had the sound of a promise.

Bucky nodded, once, offering Steve a flash of the old, fierce grin that made him look younger, more like the kid Steve remembered; a 'we' from Sharon included him, now. He and Sharon had belonged to such different parts of Steve's life, until he'd woken up to discover the two of them had formed a relationship of their own without him.

Bucky was a capable, competent, deadly adult – had been all three of those things even when he'd still been a kid too young to vote – and Sharon was likewise a grown woman with a life of her own, but...

He couldn't protect them both from Sin and the potential threat of Red Skull and also lead the Avengers, and he'd already made his choice about which responsibility came firSt. That didn't make the idea of letting them face her on their own, of being only the back-up, called in 'if they needed him,' any easier.

He hugged both of them before he left, giving Bucky a clap on the back and letting Sharon go, gently, when she stiffened slightly in his arms. "I mean it, Sharon, James," and the look in Bucky's eyes was worth the effort it took not to call him by the only name Steve had ever known him by, "if you need me, then unless Chthon's broken free and about to destroy the world, I'll find a way to come."

Sharon smiled at him, taking away the sting of that unconscious flinch. "We know you will."

* * *

No matter how many times Tony saw Hank shrink and unshrink lab equipment, it still looked like something out of Looney Tunes. He watched from the lab's doorway, carefully out of the way of expanding equipment, as Hank set a pocket-sized mass spectrometer and electron microscope on the floor, and began slowly returning them to their full sizes.

Hank had insisted on bringing over the entire contents of his lab at Stark Tower himself, claiming that he didn't trust anyone else not to screw up the calibration of the equipment, drop his shiny new three-dimensional molecular modeling unit on the floor, or burn or poison themselves with his supplies. Tony hadn't argued, even when Hank had brusquely turned down his offer of help, as well as his offer to recalibrate the lasers in the modeling unit to produce a greater degree of precision; he could empathize with Hank's reluctance to let other people interfere with his equipment. He'd only enlisted Hank's aid in moving a few piece of his own workspace because there was no way to get the anti-gravity hoist for working on quinjet engines out of Stark Tower's basement _without_ using Pym particles, much less its even bulkier hydraulics-assisted back-up.

Installing it in the Mansion's main lab had been much easier – one of the benefits of his grandfather's insistence on buying a house that occupied an entire city block was that there was more than enough room for garage workspace, labs, quinjet hangers, and anything else the Avengers needed, even if they had to go below street level for some of it.

"You realize you'll probably have to recalibrate everything again after I leave," Wanda said, from her perch on one of the newly installed work tables. "Sensitive electronic equipment doesn't like me very much."

Tony frowned. Computers and other electronics tended to be temperamental around some varieties of energy mutant, as well as most people who used magic, but he'd never been convinced that there wasn't some way to predict, control, and use Wanda's effect on computing equipment. "I still think we could find a way to tap into that if I could design a system flexible enough."

Wanda raised her eyebrows. "Considering the results we got the last time you tried to synch my powers with a computer system, I think it might be better to leave it alone."

"Leave it alone," Hank snapped. "Half the equipment in here right now is in a state of dimensional flux. One surge of chaos power while it's still recovering the rest of its mass will fry everything."

"I wasn't suggesting we try it _now._" Tony resisted the impulse to go over and help Hank set up the newly-resized spectrometer and fascinating yet maddeningly inefficient laser imaging set-up. It would be so easy to improve it, just one or two small adjustments... He reminded himself that one or two small adjustments had gotten him kicked out of technical conferences and trade shows more than once, and stayed put. Hank was twitchy enough without Tony adding to it. "The house isn't even finished yet – I'd like to at least get all the walls painted and the furniture moved in before we blow it up again."

Wanda looked away, her shoulders hunching ever so slightly. "I'm sorry about that," she said. "I didn't mean to destroy your home, Tony."

"You didn't." _'I did that myself,'_ he thought, and in a vivid flash of sense-memory, could smell the drowned remnants of smoke and ash and feel Steve's hands holding him down, violent and angry and so painfully far from what he'd wanted. It had been strangely appropriate, in a warped way – the two of them fighting in the ruins of what had once been their home, now as shattered and broken as the Avengers had been. As their friendship had been. "Chthon did. And I helped, to be honest. I turned us into a giant target, getting involved in politics the way I did. And there should have been better guards in place against Jack of Heart's power, and against Ultron."

"Yes," Hank said, not looking up from the tiny screen he was staring at, "you should have planned for Chthon to reanimate Jack's frozen corpse and bring it back from orbit."

There was a long, awkward moment of silence, while Hank obliviously continued to work. Wanda looked stricken, her eyes wide and her face raw.

Jack had gone through hell for hours every day to try and keep his powers under control, to avoid hurting anyone else – or destroying himself – with an accidental discharge of energy. Nothing Chthon could have done to him could have been crueler.

Thank god he had never known, would never know, what his body had been used to do.

Hank tapped a rapid-fire sequence of keys, and the machine made a chirping noise as it came online – Tony could feel the machine's electronic signature flare in the back of his head, joining the constant reassuring presence of his dormant armor, and the bright chatter of SHIELD's communication's systems, which he'd never shut down or logged out of after Winter Soldier and Sharon Carter's late-night visit.

Fury, he was sure, knew Tony was monitoring his organization's communications. The fact that he'd said nothing, and hadn't had any of the various computer hackers Tony had personally hired or promoted into their current positions attempt to throw him out probably meant something. Maybe it was an apology for continually foisting Koening and Gyrich off on him.

Maybe he just suspected that nobody at SHIELD would be able to successfully shut Tony out for more than a few hours. It was just possible that Carl Santacruz could manage to lock him out for as long as a day – he'd been able to disrupt the Red Skull and the Mandarin's access to SHIELD's satellites, after all – but no digital system on the scale of SHIELD's could keep Tony out completely. Not these days.

Wanda was staring down at her hands, carefully encased in black gloves that didn't match her navy blue dress. If Jan had known that she was going to wear her old Wasp gloves with a dress that color, she probably wouldn't have lent them to her – not so much because the colors didn't match as because the outfit's ugliness made it obvious that Wanda was wearing them in order to hide her hands. Jan didn't approve of hiding one's powers, or anything connected with them.

Tony left the doorway and went to stand beside Wanda. "One of us should have realized that something was wrong before it was too late," he said, keeping his eyes on Hank instead of on her. _"I_ should have realized – I know what mind control looks like. I've even worked on ways to screen for it," he added, remembering his stubborn refusal to believe that Hank's inexplicable manic behavior had just been Hank, and not some kind of outside influence, "and then never bothered to use them, even after Immortus."

They had been so young and stupid then, all of them except maybe Steve, who had already survived four years of war. It had even been useful, in a way, when Tony had been trying to hide his heart problems, his identity, his dependence on the armor's chestplate, and, later, his drinking. Unfortunately, they weren't always much smarter now.

Wanda shrugged. "They might not have worked. Supernatural possession doesn't work the same way that brainwashing or telepathic mind control does."

Hank looked up, setting aside the tiny screwdriver he'd been about to open the spectrometer's instrument panel with. "That's a good point," he said. "Remember how the clone's innate supernatural abilities interfered with Reed's mind control device?"

"Yes," Tony said grimly. "I remember." The clone of Thor had been skin-crawlingly wrong. Tony had expected it to be familiar in some way, to be essentially the same man as the friend he had lost, albeit with no memories of its own. Deep down, some stupid, irrational part of him had hoped that the clone would open his eyes and be _Thor_, that whatever supernatural essence gods were composed of would come back if they gave it a body to inhabit. What they had gotten instead had been something else. Something... emptier.

Hank sighed and looked down again, blond hair falling into his face. He always forgot to cut it when he spent time out of the field. "We fucked up." His voice was flat, tired. "You'd think it would get easier admitting that. It's not like we haven't had practice."

"Not everyone wants to hear apologies," Wanda said, "or explanations." There was a rustle of cloth as she shifted on the worktable; its hard, metal surface couldn't have been comfortable, but Hank hadn't moved the couch in yet. It, like the ants and other live specimens, would be transported last, after all the equipment was in place. "I... tried to call the X-Men. Only Beast would talk to me, and he won't tell me where Pietro is. He just wants to know how I did what I did, and if I can undo it more completely."

Hank shrugged one shoulder. "I could try to talk to him for you. I've been working on some X genome studies for him. They're fascinating; it's really a combination of genetic sequences, not a single gene, and-"

"No thank you." Wanda waved a hand, cutting him off. "It would be... I need to know where Pietro is, but I don't want to..." she trailed off, then added, "Crystal doesn't know. They share custody of Luna, so I thought maybe... He's alive. She knows that. He came and took Luna, and they disappeared somewhere."

"That's... good," Tony said, and there was a moment of heavy silence. Well, it meant that he was alive at least. "Pietro's a competent adult, and he's not going to do anything stupid or dangerous while Luna's with him; I'm sure they're both fine." It sounded like the lie it was. "At least she was willing to talk to you," he rushed on. "Blackbolt won't talk to any of us right now. Figuratively speaking, I mean. The Inhumans weren't pleased with Registration and the Initiative, or with HUSAC." Blackbolt never literally spoke to anyone, since the power of his voice could level cities, but he could convey a great deal with a look, and the look he'd given Tony the last time they'd met had been distinctly unfriendly.

Wanda raised an eyebrow. "Is there anyone in the entire superhuman community who doesn't hate us now?"

"Not everyone thought the Initiative was a bad idea," Hank said, an edge of defensiveness in his voice. "Some parents were glad to have their kids receive official training with their powers, and a lot of superhumans willingly signed up." He hesitated, then added, "And only some of them were supervillains, or just doing it because they were afraid."

"Of course they were afraid, Hank." Wanda spoke gently, voice serious. "Every time the government deals with mutants, you can hear the threat of 'do what we want, or the Sentinels will come for you again' in everything they say." She shook her head slightly, a lock of hair falling forward over her shoulder. "They're Magneto's greatest recruiting tool."

That had been one of the more surprising things about explaining the Registration Act to Wanda – she had understood. Tony had expected her to react with the same disappointment and anger Steve and Thor had shown, possibly more so, given the government's long and ugly history with mutants. Instead, she had nodded slowly, saying, _'You thought you could work with them, that if you were obedient enough, non-threatening enough, just making us all register would be enough for them. That it wouldn't go any farther.'_

_'You think I did the right thing?'_ he'd asked, surprised.

_'No,'_ she'd said. _'I think you were unexpectedly naïve. But I understand why you did it. You were afraid the alternative would be worse.'_

And it would have been. At the very least, whomever else HUSAC would have put in Tony's place would have had no qualms about dragging Peter into custody and turning him over to government scientists. And in the absence of Reed and Tony's work on the Negative Zone prison, captive superheroes would have been locked up in Genosha collars, forcibly depowered, used as experimental test subjects, or fallen victim to 'unfortunate accidents' as the superhuman facilities on the Raft became too overcrowded to keep superheroes and supervillains separate.

"The Inhumans won't talk to us, the X-Men won't talk to you, Thor hates us..." Hank ticked the points off on his fingers with the end of the miniature screwdriver. "I suppose it could be worse. At least we don't have to run off and start our own team this time."

Wanda's lips twitched, and some of the sadness left her eyes. "Poor Clint. He was ruined just by association with the rest of us."

"What about John Walker?" Tony asked, seizing on the new topic with relief. The dissolution of the West Coast Avengers had been humiliating and infuriating at the time, but compared to the past year...

"He asked for it. Literally." Wanda was smiling now, a real smile. "I don't think I'll ever forget him defending your dubious honor against Cap, though."

Tony shook his head, waving the statement away. "I was just a thinly veiled excuse for the two of them to get into a fistfight." USAgent and Steve were like oil and water; they respected one another, or at least, Tony knew John respected Steve, and was pretty sure Steve returned at least some of that regard, or he'd never have let John carry his shield, but they didn't actually like one another.

Hank put the screwdriver down and turned to face Tony and Wanda; he wasn't smiling, exactly, but there was a sort of rueful amusement on his face. "I still don't know what Steve thought he was doing. I mean, I know Jan was still angry at me, and I can't really blame her, but..."

"Punishing Tony for running away to the West Coast and leaving him all alone in New York." Wanda said as if it were self-evident. "He sulked about it for almost six months straight."

Steve would have denied that indignantly. He was convinced that he didn't sulk, despite all evidence to the contrary. In that case, however... "I don't think it was me going to California he was angry about. We had... a fight, before I left. When I was still drinking." Tony's memories of the exchange were vague – Steve's hard shoulder under him; smoke thick in the air, making him dizzy, or maybe that had been the alcohol; Steve yelling, demanding to know _why_, and Tony struggling to find words to explain, when even that took energy he didn't seem to have, and knowing that no explanation would be enough – and he didn't like to think about it too hard or too often.

Hank cleared his throat, and said, the words slightly awkward, "I wish I'd known about that when it was happening. You tried to help me – you were one of the only ones, actually." He looked away, down at the equipment he'd just finished adjusting, badly cut hair falling into his face again. "I owe you for that."

Tony shook his head, unsure how to respond. Hank wouldn't have been able to help him stop drinking, even if he'd tried. Rhodey hadn't been able to. _Steve_ hadn't been able to. It had taken hitting rock bottom and the realization that maybe he didn't actually want to die after all, that he could do more good for other people if he lived, to do it. And even then, it had been a long time before he'd felt like anything approaching himself again. In some ways, he never really had. "You really don't," he finally said, after the silence started to become uncomfortable. "Especially since I slept with Jan while you were in jail."

Hank pulled a face. "Thanks for that, by the way. It's not like I have any right to complain, but seriously, you couldn't have waited a month?"

"Sorry?" Tony offered. In retrospect, that had not been his finest hour, no matter how pleasant spending time out of costume with Jan had been. "Steve took me to task for it like you wouldn't believe."

"Wasn't this before you told her you were Iron Man?" Wanda asked. "Because if so, I'm with Cap."

Smiling at her felt... strange. This entire conversation felt slightly surreal; discussing 'the good old days' as if they were any group of old friends reminiscing, as if the past year's worth of disaster and death hadn't happened. As if they hadn't all failed each other so spectacularly.

Wanda smiled back, a little wanly, but still recognizably like the woman – the friend – Tony remembered. Even tired and haunted, wearing the drab clothing that was all she'd brought back from Europe, and with the ridiculous-looking tattoos he knew lurked under her gloves, she was still Wanda.

It was unfair of him to doubt that, to worry that having her returned to them this way was too easy, too much of a relief, to come without a price.

Everything had a price. He'd always known that; he'd just thought, hoped, that the price for complying with Registration would be something he was willing to pay. Instead, Happy and Steve had paid it. And Pepper, and May Parker, and Bill Foster, and- Tony cut that line of thought off before it could go any further. That was over now; he needed to move on. He _had_ moved on.

Except... talking and joking with Wanda and Hank, pretending that their own teammates didn't hate them and their dead friends and family weren't haunting them, wasn't all that different from watching the Negative Zone prison at three a.m. with Hank and Reed, pretending that Reed hadn't come to stare at the portal after putting his kids to bed because he couldn't fall asleep alone, and that Tony and Reed weren't both silently keeping track of Hank's anti-depressant and mood stabilizer doses after the disaster with the cloned Thor, painfully aware that there was no way to keep a suicide watch on someone who could effectively kill himself with his own powers. And that had been before the end, when they had still had no inkling of how bad it was going to become.

Both of them had been watching Tony, too, just waiting for him to start drinking again. It was probably not a coincidence that Carol had refused to leave him alone after Steve's funeral, or that Sal had made a habit of checking on him every hour or so when he'd locked himself in one of the Helicarrier's tech labs.

The gradual disappearance of those measuring, pitying looks over the past few months had been an unadulterated relief. All the more reason to avoid a repeat of his bizarre near-panic-attack the other day; falling apart now that everything was mostly okay again, without chemical prompting, would prove once and for all that he was just broken in some fundamental way, damaged and fucked up beyond repairing, regardless of Steve's or his own best efforts. And that was unacceptable.

"Well, if things don't work out here, I suppose there's always LA," Hank said, after a long stretch of silence broken only by the faint whirring and grinding of computer fans as he plugged in the two computer systems he'd brought with him and started booting them up. One was a heavily modified Stark Enterprises unit, its fan wheezing in that distinctive way that all the 2006 models' did, before they'd started using solid-state hard drives and solved the heat problem, the other a much quieter back-up system Tony had built Hank from scratch during the week after his toxin-induced hospital stay, when he'd been barred from doing any real work and desperate to keep himself occupied somehow. "That is, provided Chthon doesn't destroy it."

"That's Simon and Jessica's team now," Tony pointed out. "And Henry's. I can't crash his team after telling him that I trusted him to lead it on his own, especially not after stealing Pepper back."

"And anyway, Carol's on it." Wanda frowned, sharply arched eyebrows drawing together. "At least, I think she is."

Tony was fairly sure that Carol was on the East Coast team at this point, thanks to Steve and Jan's hints that she pick a coast and stick to it. "She and Henry had a... falling out, over Simon." Which was something he was going to have to ask Henry about, eventually, given that he'd only heard Carol's probably-biased side of the story. How exactly had he managed to lure Simon away from a threesome with two stunningly attractive women, one of whom had pheromone-enhanced sex appeal? "They're trying to avoid each other, but she went back to LA anyway because she and Jessica are in the 'ill-advised post-breakup sex' phase of a relationship."

Wanda's lips curved into a smile again. "I think Simon and I managed to stretch that out over at least four months." Then she winced, and Tony mentally kicked himself for bringing up Simon at all.

"I've had relationships that consisted of nothing but ill-advised sex," he said, deliberately light, as if Vision's all-too-present ghost weren't suddenly filling the room. The smile he forced took effort, but the momentary twitch of Wanda's lips made it worth it. "They were fun. Well, some of them were."

"Personally, I've always found that fighting leads to no sex," Hank said. "So, LA's out then. There's always New Jersey." From Peter, or Steve, or Luke Cage, or any of the other native New Yorkers who'd been on the team, it would have been a sarcastic suggestion. Hank sounded as if he were presenting it as a serious alternative.

Tony shook his head. "Steve refuses to entertain the idea of living anywhere outside the five boroughs, and he considers Staten Island's inclusion debatable. My chances of ever living in another city again are slim to none." People thought of Steve as the quintessential all-American poster boy, but he was a city kid at heart, and New York was _his_ city, just as much as it was Spiderman's, or Luke's, or Daredevil's.

Hank took a step back from the computers, clapping his hands together. "Okay," he said, "time to get to work. Safety gear, or you're both out." As he spoke, he pulled what looked like a doll's safety glasses and mask from the breast pocket of his lab coat, both of them growing smoothly to full size in his hands.

He'd been using that trick more lately than he had since California – the fewer Pym particles Hank expended on himself, the more he had to spare for inanimate objects. And Hank had always liked showing off, if not necessarily in a flashy way.

Wanda climbed down off the lab table, brushing the wrinkles out of her skirt. "Do you need Tony's help for this, or can I borrow him for a while?"

Hank waved the hand holding the goggles at her. "Please," he said. "The second I turn my back, he'll be up to his elbows in my equipment's guts. I miss my mini-lab."

"I've always found that locked doors work just as well as tree forts," Tony told him. He gestured around the room, at the empty racks of shelving waiting to be filled, the lab tables, the newly installed equipments, the walk-in temperature-controlled, humidity-controlled freezer for storing samples. "You've got a whole lab to yourself."

"I know," Hank said. "I know. It's just... not the same."

Wanda nodded, slowly. "As if part of you has been cut off," she said, raising one hand a little to flash the black glove at him. "And knowing that you chose to lose it only makes it harder."

Tony shifted uncomfortably, rubbing at his chin with his hand and feeling the rasp of his goatee against his palm. As frustrating as the Extremis's new limits were, they weren't completely unmanageable – he'd functioned without it, been Iron Man without it, for years. Even if the Mandarin's rings had burned his Extremis abilities out of him entirely, the way he'd initially feared, he didn't need to sense the armor in order to wear it and control it. He would have missed it, though, like missing a limb he'd only recently grown but had already come to rely upon. Like missing the burn of alcohol against the back of his throat.

Wanda had had her powers for her entire life; they were a part of her, not some new, technologically implanted addition. And Hank's size changing, while not an inherent ability, had been a part of him for as long as the armor had been a part of Tony. It hadn't always worked properly, just like Tony and old Shellhead hadn't always gotten along smoothly, but it was his.

He'd given it up for Jan, Tony knew, as much as he had for himself. Tony had told himself, during those brief hours when he'd thought the Extremis was dead, scoured out of him by the Mandarin's lightning, that the armor was a small price to pay for having Steve back. And it would have been, but giving it up one day at a time, knowing all the while that all he had to do was change his mind in order to have it back again... It was hard enough to fight that knowledge every time someone at the next table ordered a drink, or every time Logan had sliced the cap off a bottle of beer; he wasn't sure he could have managed to do it when it came to the armor.

"It's safer this way," Hank was telling Wanda. "You get to keep your control over your own mind, and keep Chthon out of it."

"Yes," Wanda said. "That's why I asked Strange to do it." Hank either didn't pick up on the slight sarcasm there, or simply didn't mind it.

When Tony and Wanda left, a few moments later, he had already donned safety gear and was muttering to himself as he sorted through the collection of minute containers of assorted chemicals.

"You wanted to talk to me?" Tony asked, as he followed Wanda along the hallway to the kitchen. She trailed one hand along the wall as she walked, over the scuffs still left in the plaster from construction; it would need to be repainted once all the work was finished.

"In a moment. Let me get something to eat, first."

The kitchen, in contrast to the hallways and Hank's half-set-up lab, already looked lived in. Steve had stuck a clipping from the Daily Bugle to the fridge, a photo of the Avengers fighting the miniature army of Venom symbiotes that had attacked the city a couple months ago, and bracketed it with a US Army calendar – the tank featured in this month's picture still used old Stark Industry designs for its armor piercing rounds, the technology every bit as effective and deadly as it had been a decade ago – and a deliberately cartoony drawing of the cat sleeping in his shield.

Jarvis had 'suggested' that it might be time to move Matthew Churchill Patton/Avenger-cat/Redwing's Lunch over to the mansion at least three times in the past week, ruthlessly quashing Tony's objections that the construction work might frighten it and/or provide it with an entire new realm of things to break, get stuck in, or otherwise destroy.

Wanda pulled sandwich ingredients out of the fridge and began making herself lunch. She glanced at Tony questioningly, holding the bread out to him, and he shook his head.

"I'm meeting Steve for lunch when he gets back from the Helicarrier." Even had he not been, he simply wasn't hungry. An Extremis-induced headache had been wrapped around his temples all morning, ready to turn into the familiar ice-pick stabbing over his left eye if he accessed more than three streams of data at once.

Steve was probably busy trying to talk Barnes out of being Fury's private assassin right about now – he hadn't said much about it to Tony since the night Barnes and Agent Carter had shown up on their doorstep, fresh from eliminating one of SHIELD's problems, but Tony knew it bothered him, and not just because of the risk involved.

Eventually, Steve was going to ask a few more questions about exactly how deeply Tony had been involved in that side of SHIELD's operations while he'd been director. It wasn't a conversation Tony was particularly looking forward to.

A lot of things that had seemed necessary at the time didn't seem quite so self-evidently vital and justifiable when he imagined trying to explain them to Steve. Cloning Thor was just the tip of the iceberg.

Wanda made an affirmative sound, and finished putting together her sandwich. "Carol came by yesterday," she said, as she carefully spread butter on each slice of bread in a perfect, even layer. "She wants to talk to you about Loki."

"I know," Tony said. "She already did. She thinks accepting Loki's help would have been a bad idea."

That was actually an understatement – Carol had asked him bluntly how he'd expected to deal with it when Loki stabbed them in the back at the worst possible time, and had added that she'd 'thought he was finished being deliberately self-sabotaging.' Loki, she'd insisted, couldn't be manipulated the way HUSAC could, or negotiated with like Gyrich or Koening. Tony couldn't even disagree with that; you could trust Henry Gyrich to keep a bargain, could trust Secretary Koening to do what he thought was best for national security even if what he thought was in the country's best interests was frequently not in your best interests, and even if he wasn't above using blackmail and threats to accomplish it. As little as Tony liked the man, he could at least respect him for that.

Except that if there was one thing his handful of months as Director of SHIELD had taught him, it was that you didn't throw potential allies away, even if they personally scared the hell out of you. You never knew when someone significantly scarier was going to show up.

"She doesn't think we can trust her," Wanda said, "probably because we can't. She doesn't understand how much more dangerous Chthon is. She's never really faced him; I think she's thinking of him as just another magical being, like Morgan Le Fay or the embodiments of chaos and order that we ran into a few years ago. Something limited, human. Something that can be defeated." She took a bite of her sandwich, chewing it without enthusiasm, as if she were eating mostly out of a sense of duty.

"Anything can be defeated." The objection was automatic. "You just have to figure out its weak points. Admittedly, Morgan Le Fay had a lot more of those than Chthon." Standing there hovering while Wanda sat at the table and ate was awkward, so Tony gave in and took the chair opposite her, taking advantage of Steve's absence to lean his elbow on the table and rest his forehead against his hand.

Steve worried too much, and he'd never liked the Extremis.

"We know his weakness – until and unless he can break completely free of his prison, he needs a human host. Unfortunately, he's rarely had any difficulty obtaining one."

"At least we know it won't be you," Tony offered, reaching out to lightly touch the back of one of her gloved hands. "Not this time." They could be thankful for small favors there – short of Stephen Strange, any alternate host Chthon could possess would lack Wanda's innate magical powers, and at least wouldn't have a connection to the interdimensional Nexus and an omega-level mutant's power levels to augment his own vast wellspring of power.

"We hope it won't be me," she corrected. Another bite of her sandwich was eaten, and then she set it aside. Tony sympathized; the smell of meat and cheese was making him feel slightly sick. "Carol doesn't think you can trust me, either." Her dark eyes held Tony's steadily. "She may be right. If I lose control again, the consequences could be catastrophic."

"That possibility has been considered," Tony said carefully. There was no tactful or friendly way to tell her that SHIELD had had plans to kill her if she re-surfaced and was judged to still be a global threat, or that the Illuminati had discussed meting out to Wanda the same treatment they had to the Hulk – eliminating the threat she represented by sending her off planet or to another dimension, as far away as they could, and, if that was not possible, killing her.

Professor Xavier had confessed that he felt partially to blame for M-Day, that he had let his sentimental attachment to an old friend's child prevent him from stepping in when he should have. Most of his proposed solutions had chilled Tony even further than the thought of killing Wanda in cold blood had. Better true death than the sort of 'merciful' living death Xavier had proposed.

It had to be better. Even Pepper had agreed that it was.

"Good." Wanda's voice was quiet, but there was an odd fierceness to it. "I caused so much destruction, hurt so many people – without these seals, I could destroy the world." She tilted her head to one side, sweeping the heavy mass of her hair to one side to expose the glyphs tattooed at the base of her neck. "You have no idea how dangerous I'd be without this. Omega-level mutants are... unstoppable. You remember what happened to the Professor, and Jean."

Tony met her eyes before he spoke, making certain she knew how serious he was. "We wouldn't let that happen. Not again."

Wanda stared at him for a moment, searching his face for something. Whatever it was, she must have found it, because she nodded slowly. "I believe you. I know it's a terrible thing to ask, but if it comes to it, Carol on her own wouldn't be enough to stop me. Maybe at the height of her Binary powers, but not now. Not anymore."

"You have my word," Tony said, the words awkward and heavy in his mouth. "If it comes to it, I'll do whatever it takes." Another old friend's life, balanced against the world – such an obvious choice, in the abstract, but when it came down to it... Steve's body would be burned into his memories forever, a permanent reminder that some sacrifices were too high to bear. Happy's face still haunted his nightmares; the empty absence of signal after Tony had shut down his life support had echoed in his head for days, until he'd longed for the whisky or vodka that would drown the silence out.

But if it were him, if the Extremis were hacked again... Better death than to be used as a living weapon against the people he loved. He'd lived through that before, under Immortus's control, killing two women who had known and trusted him, and if one of the other Avengers had struck him down then, he would have welcomed it.

"I won't let him use you again," he promised, and part of him ached even as he said it, wishing it were a lie.

Wanda was silent for a painfully stretched-out moment, staring at him with a stiff, blank expression. Then her face twisted, her eyes going bright and glassy with tears, and she jumped to her feet, leaning across the table and enveloping Tony in a hug.

"Thank you," she whispered. "There was no one else I could have asked. Thank you."

Pepper had thanked him, too. Tony closed his eyes, forcing himself not to stiffen under Wanda's touch, and was suddenly grateful he had refused her offer of food as his throat closed up and tight pain seized at his chest. The air in the room felt thin and hot, suffocating.

Doing what had to be done didn't always mean doing what was right, and it never got any easier, except when he'd been too drunk to care.

He should have said something, told her that he understood, that it was all right, but he couldn't find the words.


	8. Chapter 8

**Chapter Eight**

Clint ducked low under a laser blast and rolled, coming up to one knee and knocking an arrow in one smooth motion. Jan, beside him, was slightly slower to dodge, the laser catching her on the shoulder.

Hank winced, watching her rub at the spot, and lowered the lasers' energy levels. With the training room's safety protocols fully engaged they were already at close to minimum, but you couldn't be too careful the first time you live-tested any version of a danger room.

She was trying out a twelve-foot tall height similar to Hank's old Goliath form, so the lasers affected her less than they would have at Wasp size, but the unfamiliar size also made her less graceful than usual. Jan had been able to grow as well as shrink for over a year now, but she almost never used the ability, and it took significant amounts of practice to get used to fighting while giant-sized, or even simply moving around.

One of the room's metal floor plates dipped sideways, making the floor under Jan and Clint lurch. The two of them didn't even break stride, charging forward at the holographic figures at the other end of the room.

The system's reaction-time to hits with Clint's arrows was lagging; the simulation reacted to the impacts a fraction slower than it should have, and the data display that should have broken down the exact angle of impact and degree of force the arrow had hit at simply read "error." Was there something wrong with the motion sensors? The pressure sensors monitoring the impact? The coding? The interface between the sensors and the computer? Hank made a mental note to mention it to Tony. Let him be the one to go over all the code line by line; it was probably his error anyway.

In biology, unexpected results meant new avenues to explore, rather than "somewhere within these millions of lines of code is an error to be found and fixed."

Two metal tentacles emerged from slots in the wall and reached for Jan. This time, she dodged easily, twisting sideways to let one tentacle grope past her and grabbing the other in her hand. In her place, Hank would have grown about fifty percent and then tried to rip the tentacle out of the wall. Jan simply grabbed for the other tentacle and wrapped the two around one another, then abandoned them to make a dive for the holographic supervillain, who was trying to 'escape' from Clint.

Jan grabbed 'him' by the shoulders and lifted him off the floor, then held him there, feet kicking uselessly. "I could get used to this." Her voice was crisp and clear over the intercom system – that part of the set up was in perfect working order. "It's kind of fun being the biggest person in the fight."

"It still hurts just as hard when people hit you." Clint yanked one of his arrows out of a laser port and squinted at the tip. "The longer reach is useful, though. You can pull a twelve or thirteen foot longbow at that height."

Hank had vivid memories of that longbow, and the thumb-thick arrows Clint had played around with before he'd decided that being Goliath was more trouble than it was worth and stopped taking Pym particles. He'd never gained the ability to produce them biologically the way Hank, Jan, Scott, and Bill had, anyway.

There had been a standard-sized crossbow, too, at one point, which Clint had waved around like a toy and drawn by hand. Being slow to adjust to Pym particles had probably been less of a factor in Clint's blithe dismissal of superpowers than the fact that being Goliath didn't involve playing with projectile weapons.

_"Objective Achieved,"_ the training program announced, in a pleasant female voice that was disquietingly reminiscent of Jocasta. "_Program shutting down._"

The supervillian vanished from Jan's grasp, and the tentacles unwound themselves from one another and retracted smoothly back into the wall.

"That looked good," Hank said. "Tony's going to need to do some fine-tuning on the motion sensors and the holo-dummy's response time, but everything seems like it's running smoothly." It had been a simple training sequence – Jan and Clint had barely broken a sweat – but serious exercise hadn't been the point. The training room had had to be tested before anyone could safely use it without supervison; thus far it had shown a reassuring lack of either sentience or a desire to kill them, but Hank had found that when it came to complex computer systems, a little paranoia never hurt.

"Great. If there are no major problems, then now we can trade off." Jan locked her fingers together and stretched her arms above her head. The motion threw the curves of her body into momentary sharp relief, and Hank watched appreciatively. If he were in Clint's position at that moment, Jan's breasts would have been higher than his head, more than twice the size they usually were. The thought made him pettily glad that Clint hadn't chosen that moment to look up.

There was more than one reason why Hank missed the ability to shrink down.

"That's not necessary," he started to explain. "The system checks out, mostly, so it should be all right to run it without-"

"Yeah, it is," Clint interrupted. "Because you're coming down here now, and I'd like Tony's opinion on the computer systems before we let it run with nobody watching them."

"Why? Because you don't trust me with computer systems and AIs?" It wasn't until the question was out that it occurred to Hank that it might not be one he wanted to ask.

"No, because Tony's better with computers than you are."

That might be true, but Hank still knew significantly more about computers than Clint. He was trying to think of the most insulting way possible to point this out when Jan stepped forward and fluttered her eyelashes at the nearest camera.

"Boys, don't fight," she cooed, and then, in a significantly less flirtatious voice, "Turn off the computers and get down here, Hank. Exercise is good for you."

"We haven't run the second-level tests yet," Hank protested. Expecting him to work out in the training simulation room was unfair; the mansion had a perfectly good gym with weights and punching bags and brand new exercise equipment expensive and fancy enough to make luxury health spas weep with envy, and, most importantly, nothing in it to remind him of the powers he wasn't able to use.

The nearest monitor screen showed Clint rolling his eyes in high-definition close-up. "Forget the tests. Cap's not down here right now to kick your ass, so Jan and I are going to have to do it. She can run a basic level training simulation just as well as you can."

"Carefully," Jan said. "I have plans for Hank's ass that don't involve you damaging it.

"I don't think that's necessary. I'm-"

"Superpowered people depend too much on their powers in a fight," Clint said, and Hank didn't have to look at the monitor screen to know he was smirking, "and now that you can't use yours, you need to practice fighting the way us mere mortals do."

Why did Clint have to rub that in? Especially in front of Jan. "I'm not in the field anymore." Because I'm _crazy_ and I have to take medication that won't work if I grow to Giant-Man or Goliath size and will kill me if I shrink, he thought. He didn't say it, because the whole topic was an uncomfortable one, for himself more than anyone else. It was humiliating to have to sit on the sidelines because he couldn't function like a normal person without medication, and hadn't figured out how to keep the levels of it in his bloodstream stable while shrinking.

It had to be possible. It was in theory, he knew, and he'd even verified it by having Reed check his math, embarrassing as that always was.

"Because it's not like anything ever attacks your lab," Clint said.

Jan smiled at him through the monitors, and even knowing that she'd probably orchestrated this whole thing to try and drag him out of his lab and make him 'do something fun,' Hank couldn't be annoyed with her. "He's got a point, honey. Come on. It'll be fun. I'm just going to go upstairs and watch the two of you get all sweaty."

Hank had already resigned himself to an hour or so of tedious and vaguely humiliating physical effort. The thought of Jan watching and enjoying the view made it a little more appealing, but not much.

"If I'm doing this without powers, I expect you to do it unarmed," he told Clint a short while later, eying Clint's garishly purple compound bow.

Clint shrugged one shoulder. "Deal with it. In a real fight the other guys are going to have powers or weapons. Anyway, I could still mop the floor with you bare-handed."

"I thought this was a teamwork simulation."

"The beauty of team simulations is that I don't have to be faster than the holographic bad guys. I just have to be faster than you."

Hank didn't bother to reply, listening instead for the background whirr of the room's systems coming back online. The holodummies had a split-second lag time, he reminded himself. It would make them clumsier, just enough to give him an edge.

It did, in fact, give him an edge, enough that he was able to keep pace with Clint as they fought their way through the obstacle course of tentacles, lasers, and shifting floor and wall plates toward the nest of robots at the far end of the room.

They were supposed to be copies of Ultron V, complete with fixed, glowing red grins, but Jan had tweaked the scenario, turning them into generic robotic figures. Hank appreciated the gesture, though it might have been nicely cathartic to pound the snot out of a series of slightly-malfunctioning Ultrons.

A metal tentacle looped around his ankle, and Hank went sprawling, managing to twist just enough to hit the ground with his shoulder instead of his face. Another tentacle wrapped around his waist, pinning his left arm to his side. Hank struggled, trying to pull free and fighting the instinct to shrink down. The metal coils were smooth, with nothing to give a 'victim' any purchase if one's hands weren't large enough to wrap completely around them.

He heard the whine of Clint's arrow and the clang of it hitting metal and had an instant to brace himself for the crackle of electricity. It didn't come; there was a sharp shock of static, and the tentacles released him abruptly.

Hank rolled away, shoving himself to his feet inches ahead of a low-power laser blast. Practice arrows, of course. The real, fully charged shock arrows would have knocked him out cold, the electric charge travelling the length of the metal tentacles and taking him out along with them.

"Nice creative problem solving," he gasped, as the first of the robots charged at them. "If this were real, you'd be on your own now."

"It's not," Clint grunted, blocking a metal fist with one arm and shoving his bow between the robot's legs, "and I'm not." The robot toppled, and Clint leapt over it with enviable ease.

Blows from holodummies didn't have the force of a real attack, but they still hurt. Hank was going to have bruises later – Jan had set the safety protocols at level two, not level one. It was actually kind of flattering, he reflected, as he tackled the robot trying to take Clint from behind, to know that she trusted him to take care of himself at least that far, powers or no.

By the time Hank had finished smashing the robot's head into the floor, exploding arrows had taken out three of the others, and Clint was wrestling with the final one, his bow lying on the floor several feet away. The robot had him pinned against the wall, and was slowly strangling him with a hand around his throat – or would have been, had this been real. Its hand was actually just wrapped loosely and completely harmlessly around his throat.

Hank tapped the robot on the shoulder and then, when it swung around slightly to face him, punched it directly in its metal faceplate. Or at least, that's what he had intended to do.

"Ow, what the hell?" Clint yelped, clapping one hand over his nose. The robot staggered backwards into Hank's next punch, an arrow jutting out from the vulnerable point where its legs joined its body. Hank ripped the arrow loose and jammed it into the robot's glowing white eye, and the holodummy vanished, Clint's arrow clattering to the floor.

"Great, guys. That's level two cleared, and the system didn't throw up any red flags." Jan's voice was loud over the intercom, drowning out the faint whirr of floor plates shifting back into their normal position.

Hank flexed his fingers, his knuckles still smarting from their impact with Clint's nose. "You know, I really prefer either being small enough that I'm nearly invisible or being bigger than anyone else in the fight." In both cases, you were less likely to get in your own teammates' way.

Clint swore, glaring at Hank from behind his hand. "You didn't pull that last punch."

"I didn't expect your face to suddenly be between me and the robot," Hank said defensively, feeling his face heat. "Sorry." Clint's nose was the angry red of something that was going to start swelling soon, but it didn't look like it was bleeding, and Hank hadn't felt it crunch, so at least he hadn't broken it.

Clint prodded at it gently, and winced. "Well, we don't have to work on your right hook."

"You could have ducked," Jan said, sounding more amused than sympathetic. "The two of you looked like the three stooges. And _you_ have to be more careful about letting those tentacles grab you," she added. "You can't shrink down to get away from them, or increase size to break free."

"I know." It wasn't technically true; he could still increase his size if it were truly an emergency, he'd just pay for it later. Increasing size diluted chemicals in the bloodstream, so he was supposed to avoid it, but only shrinking would actually be dangerous. "I think I did pretty well for someone without powers or weapons." Especially considering that it had been far too long since he'd done this.

"You did," she agreed. "The way you tackled that robot was very manly."

"I took out about three times as many of them," Clint said, but he didn't sound as if he meant the objection. Hank had been on the receiving end of enough actual resentment from Don and Thor recently to know when he heard it. And when he didn't.

It was nice to have teammates around who hadn't had a front seat view of or a personal stake in the registration disaster.

"You were very manly, too. Almost as manly as Hank."

"Yeah, well, I'm kicking your manly ass tomorrow." Clint jabbed a finger at him. "Cap wants you and Wanda back in unarmed combat practice."

"We'll see about that." He should have been annoyed – the genetic research for Beast hadn't produced any results yet, but he hadn't started comparing the homo superior genome to baseline human genetic material yet, and that was sure to generate interesting data – but instead, he found himself smiling. Jan was right. It was good for him to get out of the lab once in a while.

* * *

"What part of 'keep a low profile' is too complex for you to understand?" Had a subordinate proved to be so disobedient, he would have lived only just long enough to regret it. The necessity of keeping Sin under the impression that she was an ally rather than a simple tool was growing tiresome. "Your vendetta against SHIELD contributes nothing towards our ultimate goal," Doom explained, with more than admirable patience. "When I have the spear and its powers, you will be amply rewarded. You can then deal with Captain America and his sidekick as you see fit. For now, you will do nothing. Do you understand?"

Sin sneered, the expression giving her the look of the sullen adolescent she all too frequently acted like. "I understand that doing nothing seems to be your entire plan lately. Are we going to sit around and wait until Strange or Murdock die of old age? You said we only had until March before the spear's power would be 'lost to you forever.'" She parroted his own words back at him with a mocking lilt.

Had he thought it would do any good, he could have explained that the levels of chaos energy in the city were slowly but inexorably rising, twisting the forces of chance and fate in their favor. The spear wanted to be found, the power in it hungered to be used, and given time, it would force a means of grasping it to surface. They simply had to bide their time.

Doom, however, explained himself to no one. "The equinox is still months away. I would council patience, but I imagine that is beyond you."

Sin's eyes narrowed to slits, the pouty adolescent façade cracking and falling away. "I want blood, Victor. I want the vengeance you promised me. I want my father and Brock back, and I want to watch my father's glorious Reich rise from the ashes of this filthy country." She took a deep breath, and her voice was reasonable again, even sweet. "But I'd settle for some kind of progress. Give me results, or you can find someone else to fetch the spear for you. I think Zola is still out there somewhere."

"You forget who you speak to," Doom said, in tones of freezing menace. "You would accomplish nothing on your own, and amusing as it would be to see you fail and come crawling back, it would waste time." It was a calculated risk, all but daring her to leave, but the reminder of her own pathetic helplessness might work in his favor.

Zola, slimy little Nazi scientist who sold his skills to the highest bidder that he was, would be an inadequate assistant. If he were forced to hire someone to fetch the spear for him, he would have to completely counteract the sorcerer supreme's protection spells, at which point Doom might as well just walk in and take the spear himself. Sin, with her painfully obvious belief that _she_ was the one who was using him, wanted the spear in Doom's hands to further her own agenda, not his. The portions of Strange's spell aimed directly at thwarting Doom would overlook her presence, leaving Doom only the task of finding a spell that would allow a person with no magical abilities to remove the spear from its hiding place and carry it out to him. Then, he could use its power to demolish Strange for his interference.

"My father was conquering the world before you were even born, you jumped up piece of trash," Sin spat. "You need me more than I need you. Don't forget that." She turned on her heel and stalked out of the room, boots loud against the warehouse's stone floor.

Doom watched her go with gritted teeth and reminded himself again of all the reasons why he couldn't kill her yet.

* * *

One of the benefits of having a significant other who gave more money to the Metropolitan Museum of Art than many people earned in a year was that the dinners, special exhibition previews, and private showings that museum sponsors were invited to generally included a 'plus one.' That was, for significant others who were free to broadcast their relationship to all and sundry without ending up on the front page of every newspaper in the country, and probably a few international ones as well.

Luckily, this particular exhibition preview was open to all museum donors at the $500 a year level and up, so Steve was able to be there without openly attending as Tony's date. Tony's official 'plus one' for the evening was Wanda.

Steve tugged at his tie, knowing he was pulling the knot out of shape but not particularly caring. The last time he'd worn this suit had been at the Senate and Congressional hearings over the SHRA; the day they'd arrived in DC, Tony had sent him shopping with Jan along as a guarantee of good taste, and he'd come back with clothing more expensive than any he'd ever owned, short of his costume.

He felt stiff and strange in it, not uncomfortable, but oddly on display in a way he wasn't while in costume.

"Stop fidgeting," Jan said. "You look perfect."

Steve let go of his tie, embarrassed at being caught yanking at it like a kid who'd been forced into his Sunday best, only to realize that Jan hadn't been speaking to him.

"That's because you dressed me like a doll," Hank was saying, as she straightened the collar of his shirt. "I still don't see what was wrong with the blue tie."

"It didn't match your suit." Jan smoothed his lapel, then gave it a little pat before letting her hand drop. "Navy blue doesn't go with black. And you make a very attractive doll."

Steve looked away, giving them a moment of privacy; Tony was on the other side of the room, smiling stiffly at a vaguely familiar-looking man whom Steve was fairly sure was involved in city politics somehow. He, unlike Hank, didn't have a single fold of fabric out of place, for all that his hair was artfully disheveled in a way that probably looked intentional, but was actually Steve's fault. Tony usually wore suits and dress shirts, unless he was planning to spend some quality time tearing machinery apart, and he always looked good in them, but when he made a real effort to dress nicely, as he had tonight, the impulse to muss up and pull apart that perfectly constructed armor of suit and tie was irresistible.

One good tug, and the half-windsor knot in his tie would fall right out.

Tempting as the thought was, they had too large an audience right now for Steve to indulge himself. Tony, being Tony, would probably make no effort to stop him if he tried.

"Isn't that the city councilman who wants to ban feeding pigeons?" Sam's voice was dry. "You think we should go rescue Tony?"

Steve shrugged. "He can fend for himself." Tony might not actually enjoy politics, but he was good at them.

"I'll miss the chance to ask Councilman Englehart some probing questions about his pigeon population control legislation." Sam glanced over at the man again, eyes narrowing slightly; under the joking tone was a thread of something more serious.

The name was familiar, and not from arguments about animal rights and public sanitation. Englehart was one of the supporters of a proposal to ban known superheroes from working for the city, citing potential conflicts of interest, as well as potential lawsuits. "I don't think that would be a good idea," Steve said. "This isn't an art show in DUMBO. A loud public argument about politics will get us kicked out."

"I'm not going to argue," Sam said mildly. "I'm just going to remind him that being a superhero is not currently against the law."

Judging by the tightening of Englehart's lips, and the way he was shaking his head, Tony was already doing that. It didn't appear to be working.

"I haven't seen the rest of the exhibit yet," Steve countered. The 'Art and Artifacts of Alchemy' exhibit was scheduled to open to the general public next Friday, and a banner announcing its presence already hung outside the museum. Medieval and Renaissance art had never been Steve's field, but he could appreciate the complex symbolism in the one painting and two seventeenth century engravings he'd seen thus far. Tony would like them; they were like puzzles in visual form, each of the pictures showing some part of a chemical process.

Tony hated magic, but alchemy had enough science in it that it might not count. And the chiaroscuro woodcut he could see hanging on the opposite wall, just behind a knot of men and women in evening wear, looked utterly breathtaking in its degree of detail.

"You know," Sam said, after he had given Steve several silent minutes to appreciate the woodcut's workmanship, "I keep renewing my membership, but I don't think I've been here in a year."

"It's been a very long year." The words sounded more serious than Steve had meant them to, largely because they were true.

Sam nodded. "Longer than you know. Things were getting bad before you came back. Englehart's superhero legislation's going to set a real bad precedent if it passes, but it's a drop in the bucket compared with what was going on before."

"I know." Tony hadn't said much about the inner workings of the Initiative, other than what he'd admitted to on the witness stand, but the few things he had let slip had told Steve that there were things that hadn't come out even in the congressional hearings. _'I didn't order any assassinations when I was Director of SHIELD'_, he'd said carefully, and the deliberate phrasing had been a red flag that while Tony might not have been ordering assassinations, someone else might have been.

Not that SHIELD didn't solve problems by making people quietly disappear even now, but Steve had far more faith in Nick Fury's ability to make that judgment call than he had in the people who had been pulling HUSAC's strings. Not everyone involved with Registration or with the Initiative could have been as innocent of the true identity of Representative Dickstein's silent sponsor as they'd claimed. Whether they'd believed him to be Aleksander Lukin or known that he was the Red Skull, some of them had still had to know that he wasn't who he claimed to be. Known, and not cared, just as they hadn't cared about the innocent people shut away in extra-dimensional prisons, or the black ops program that had wanted to start a new super soldier project, with methods reminiscent of the Weapon X program. Or of the original Project Rebirth – unwilling or deliberately under-informed human test subjects had been part of that, too.

Next year was an election year. Steve hoped devoutly that the remaining congressmen who had served on the Unregistered Superhuman Activities Committee – and not been booted out of office already for taking bribes from known terrorists – would not be re-elected.

Sam shook his head, pulling his shirt cuffs straight and brushing futilely at the punctures in the fabric of his right coat sleeve, the spacing of the tears looking suspiciously like something Redwing's talons might have made. "I don't want to talk about this. I'm tired of thinking about it. And about Chthon and whatever part of Lower Manhattan's going to blow up or fall down next. Have they re-opened the Islamic art gallery yet?"

"I know what you mean," Steve said, with feeling. "And no. They're still refurbishing it. Very slowly and carefully. They've been slowly and carefully refurbishing it since 2001."

Sam snorted. "I'm surprised at you," he said, voice dry with irony again, "suggesting that they'd shut an entire gallery down for bullshit political reasons. I'm sure it really needs years' worth of renovations."

"Maybe I should suggest that Tony earmark his next donation for that gallery. Can you do that?"

Sam shrugged. "When you're giving a museum enough money to have your name carved on a plaque in the front hallway, you can probably do whatever you want."

It was a tempting thought, but actually attempting to put pressure on the museum via donations would be unethical. And it wasn't Steve's money to spend, either, though Tony wasn't likely to object to using financial blackmail for a good cause. Not ethical, he reminded himself.

At least the Museum of Natural History had refused to bow to pressure to remove all discussions of _Homo superior_ from their new "Hall of Human Origins" exhibit. You had to take victories where you could find them.

Tony had managed to escape from Englehart, and was now talking to the owner of a major Manhattan development company. Beyond him, Wanda was walking slowly down the length of the exhibit hall, stopping to study each piece. Hank was deep in conversation with one of the museum curators, and kept gesturing at a display case of 16th century laboratory instruments. Jan, beside him, was watching with a proprietary little smile that Steve hoped he hadn't been wearing when he'd been admiring the fit of Tony's suit jacket earlier.

Steve was examining another woodcut, this one from the mid-1500s and carefully displayed in a dimly lit alcove, when he felt another presence behind him. He wasn't sure what bit of information told his brain that was Tony – maybe the sound of his footsteps, maybe some scent, the sound of his breathing – but his subconscious had identified him before the other man spoke.

"Someday we need to come here on a real date."

Steve smiled, and kept looking at the woodcut; he didn't need to see Tony to imagine the rueful little smile on his face. "When there are fewer cameras around, maybe." In the woodcut, a man and a woman were locked in a passionate embrace, while a bird hovered over them, transfixed in a ray of light. In the background, a lion was eating the sun. The little plaque to the left of the image explained that the couple represented the sun and the moon, and the lion, the role of spiritual mercury as a universal solvent.

There was a faint hint of apology in Tony's voice as he said, "If it was just my reputation and SE's stock points, I'd say to hell with it and just kiss you somewhere extremely public and get it over with. The tabloids have been speculating about me for years anyway."

Steve shook his head. Turning around was automatic; after years of dealing with Tony as Iron Man, Steve could carry on a conversation with Tony without needing to see his face, but hearing Tony's voice coming from just over his shoulder made the skin on the back of his neck tingle distractingly. "If it was just our reputations at stake, I wouldn't hide anything." Steve met Tony's gaze, hoping the words sounded sincere, and not like empty rhetoric. He meant them – their relationship was not the media's business, and part of him cringed at the idea of having it dragged through the headlines and discussed on talk shows as if it were something tawdry and sordid, something to be ashamed of, but hiding it was like a silent agreement that there _was_ something wrong with it, with both of them – but he had never been very good at these kinds of conversations. But if Peter could unmask in front of cameras, Steve could hardly do less.

Tony's eyes looked closer to grey than blue in the corner's carefully dim light, and some trick of lighting made dark shadows gather under them. Or maybe the dark smudges were real. "We don't have anything to hide," Steve went on. "It's not illegal anymore." He probably sounded as if he were giving a speech, he reflected, and from Tony's fractional headshake, it wasn't a very convincing one.

"We can't afford any distractions right now. Not until Chthon's been dealt with." Tony had the sound of a man trying to convince himself.

It was true, just as the fact that they'd needed to make first the SHRA and then the team their priority was true. Chthon could turn the entire world into a barren wasteland, and would, if he got free.

"When he is, I'll take you dancing," Steve promised, recklessly. He'd danced with Bernie and Connie, and even Sharon, though she preferred unarmed combat practice to swing dancing. And with Diamondback, who had always tried to lead. Tony would, too – it was a nearly impossible habit to break, as Steve had learned when Rachel had tried to make him follow her and do all the steps backwards. Having Tony's arms around him in public would be worth tripping backwards over his own feet and looking like an idiot.

Tony's smile was real this time, crinkling the corners of his eyes, though the shadows under them remained. "I'll hold you to that." His eyes flicked over Steve's suit, and the smile turned amused. "What have you been doing to your tie?"

Steve glanced down at his shirt front before he could stop him. "Nothing. It's fine."

"It's crooked." Tony took a half-step forward, closing the distance between them, and took hold of Steve's tie in both hands, tugging on the knot until it was tight once more. He smoothed it carefully over Steve's chest, fingers lingering for just a moment, then stepped back.

He gave Steve a second once-over, his eyes filling with heat. "You should let Jan pick out your clothing more often."

"I feel like a fish out of water in suits." At least, he did in suits as nice as this one. Though Tony was probably imagining him _without_ the suit, judging by his expression.

Tony's lips curved into something between a smile and a smirk. "You don't look like one. Not in this suit," he said, a familiar husky sound to his voice, the one that always sent a shiver down Steve's spine and started a slow heat in the pit of stomach.

Not here, Steve reminded himself. Not yet.

"Besides," Tony added, "Happy was the one who always looked like a thug." He hesitated, looking away at the woodcut over Steve's shoulder. Steve was struck again by how tired he suddenly looked. "The more expensive the suit, the more he looked like hired mob muscle," Tony finished, voice subdued.

Then he looked back at Steve, and the smile on his face was strained. "He would have complained that he was just a big, dumb, ex-bruiser who didn't understand anything here, and asked me why I couldn't have brought someone else instead, and secretly looked at everything here while pretending not to, and loved the whole thing."

Steve let the topic of Happy drop. "I still think Carol and Clint would have enjoyed it if they'd come."

Tony didn't actually roll his eyes, but some quirk of facial expression implied the motion anyway. "Steve, not everyone enjoys art museums just because you think they should. Do you really think Hank would be here if it weren't an exhibit on debunked, pseudo-magical proto-chemistry?"

"Yes," Steve said. "Jan is here." He glanced automatically around the room once again, taking in the scattered knots of museum donors. Hank and Jan had split up, Jan chatting with a tall Asian woman in impressively stacked heels while Hank examined a display of woodcuts depicting the process of distillation.

Sam was talking to one of the museum curators; by the hand gestures he was making, either fishing or baseball was involved. Or he was waving a hand in frustration as he tried to convey exactly how irritating it was that the Islamic Art gallery was shut down, but Steve didn't think so. The conversation looked friendly.

It took him a moment to find Wanda – he still looked automatically for bold colors, and the steel-grey dress she and Jan had found at the last minute was the sort of thing the eye skimmed over without really seeing. Neutral, cool.

She was standing still, near the center of the gallery, staring at the room around her as if searching for something.

Steve thought for a moment that she might be looking for them, but as he stepped out of the shadows, she stiffened, her gaze locked on something on the far side of the room.

He went over to her, not needing to ask Tony to follow him. Sam met them halfway there, his eyes going from Steve to Wanda in a silent question.

Steve shook his head; there was no danger here that he could see. The stiff line of Wanda's back and the frozen lack of expression on her face had set off alarm bells, though. Something was wrong here, even if he himself had noticed nothing.

She was standing by a glass display case when they reached her, staring down at an old, leather bound book that had been carefully propped open to show an elaborate print of the symbols of the zodiac. The red leather of the cover and binding had faded to a rusty brown, and the pages were faded and worn.

"I can feel him whispering," Wanda said, softly, her voice eerily calm. "But only when I stand here."

A chill crawling up his spine, Steve took her by the arm, trying to be gentle, and pulled her a few steps away from the display case. The plaque beside it proclaimed that the book was a 16th century study of alchemy and astronomy by John Dee, collecting excerpts from numerous Renaissance writings on alchemy. From the central location of the display and the size of the plaque, it was one of the showpieces of the exhibit.

Sam cast an uneasy glance at the book, his eyebrows drawing together. "You mean Chthon? What do you mean you can hear him? I thought he could only enter this dimension from the cathedral."

Sam hadn't been there for the last time they had fought Chthon, or the time before that. Steve had done his best to brief him on what had happened each time, but he wasn't sure how well he understood the link between Wanda and Chthon himself.

Tony, if anything, looked even more uneasy. "Strange didn't say that, exactly. He said he could only break through the dimensional barriers there, because a fragment of his essence is trapped inside the building. He didn't say he couldn't reach through and influence things in other places."

Wanda was shaking her head, eyes still on the book. "Not hear," she corrected Sam, the words quiet. "Feel. Everything else in here is just art, or old scientific instruments. This book has real magic in it." She shivered visibly and rubbed at her arms, and for a moment, Steve thought he saw glints of reddish light play over the tattoos on her hands and the back of her neck. "Chaos magic. Dark magic. Chaos can be a joyful and creative force, but whatever's in this book is destructive, malevolent. Like he is. It's..." she looked back at the book again, hesitating, then looked away, "it wants to be used. I can feel it waiting."

"How about we move a little further away from it?" Sam suggested.

"I think that would be good." Wanda backed slowly away from the display case, nearly bumping into an older white man who was trying to look at the case of lab instruments.

Tony touched one finger to the little white plaque. "John Dee," he read. "He was fascinated by angels and demons. He spent years trying to contact angelic powers; he wanted to ask them questions about theology and natural philosophy."

It could have been a coincidence. Steve wanted to believe it was. But Chthon was a chaos entity, a being who could reshape and manipulate probability as easily as he could human minds; there were no coincidences when you dealt with him.

"I think," Steve said, "that we should talk to one of the curators."


	9. Chapter 9

**Chapter Nine**

Steve carefully smudged the shading around the curve of the vase until it was even, then studied it and considered the merits of erasing and starting over again. The entire thing was slightly but visibly lopsided.

Still lives were not one of his strengths, but then, that was what made them good practice.

The cat, curled up on the back of the couch, rearranged himself with a creak of leather and settled back into position with both of his hind feet shoved into the back of Steve's neck. A slight prick of claws warned that he would be displeased if Steve attempted to either move or push his feet away.

"See," Tony said. "I told you he liked you."

"As a foot rest," Steve returned. Thankfully, his hair was too short for chewing on — human hair seemed to inexplicably delight the cat, and he almost hadn't survived his first encounter with Carol, which had involved launching himself at her head from behind while she'd been sitting on the couch.

"Hmm," Tony said, the bulk of his attention already back on whatever he was doing with the laptop and tablet he had set up on the coffee table. On the screen, computerized wire drawings expanded, rotated through 360 degrees, and were minimized again, while his little plastic stylus flashed over the tablet's surface. He never actually looked at the screen, eyes focused on something invisible in the middle distance, probably the schematics in his head. Steve wasn't sure how much of that was the Extremis, and how much was just Tony's ability to design things in his head.

He had finally gotten used to the near-silence in which Tony often used computers these days; the lack of clacking keys was one of the few benefits of the Extremis, since Tony tended to type furiously and loudly. The quiet was nice, peaceful. They hadn't had many chances lately to just sit around and relax.

The constant stream of disasters in Manhattan hadn't stopped. If anything, it seemed to be spreading — there had been a three-alarm fire in Brooklyn yesterday, apparently caused by a single dropped cigarette, and a woman in Chelsea had stabbed her husband and two dinner guests to death with a kitchen knife, before turning it on herself. Disasters, accidents, and a wave of violent crimes, all frustratingly completely beyond their ability to stop. Half the time, there wasn't even anything Steve could try to do to help.

The chaos-tainted book at the museum was still unguarded, the museum administrators having taken Wanda's warning about it precisely as seriously as they did the insistence by museum staff that it was cursed. There had been a rash of minor accidents surrounding it, according to the security guard Sam had spoken to, but it was the keystone of their special exhibit, and they were reluctant to remove it.

Its presence could have been a coincidence, of course, but where chaos magic was concerned, very few things were.

In between crises, Steve and Sam had somehow managed to get Sam's things moved over to the mansion, after he'd decided that Steve and Tony staying there alone with Wanda wasn't a good idea. Steve wasn't sure if he was more worried about Wanda falling under Chthon's influence again, or about something — or someone — coming after Wanda, but his presence was welcome. Tony had been burying himself in his lab or his office at Stark Enterprises for the past week. Twice, he hadn't even come to bed, staying down there all night.

Sam had been remarkably good-natured about it when Steve had dragged him into the den to watch movies with him.

He didn't sleep well on his own, not after four months of sharing a bed.

Tony was poking desultorily at his computer now, resting his chin on one hand; Steve wasn't sure if he was putting the finishing touches on his project, or had just run out of steam. He had been working on it for at least an hour, by Steve's watch.

His own project, Steve decided, was hopelessly unfixable. He hadn't been paying enough attention to his work, and he'd nearly erased through the paper in two places, and the vase was still lopsided. He wasn't getting the curvature right, or the reflections.

He folded the page back, giving himself a pristine new surface to draw on, and let himself doodle absentmindedly. He was probably trying too hard, holding the pencil too tightly and over-controlling the lines.

"What are you working on?" he asked. Tony's answer might or might not make any sense, but listening to him ramble about engines or computers was always soothing.

"Some blueprints and computer models," Tony said, after a pause. He didn't sound particularly enthusiastic, which meant whatever it was probably didn't explode, break the sound barrier, pioneer a new computer operating system, or do anything else particularly interesting, at least by Tony's standards.

"What for?" Steve prompted, after a long moment of silence had stretched between them.

Tony sighed, and looked up from the computer, rubbing at his face with one hand. "Wind turbines. And the navigation system for the Boeing bid. R&amp;D kept sending back crap, so I said I'd do it myself."

"Don't you always?"

"It would be nice not to have to once in a while."

Coming from a man whom Steve had known to personally redesign completely functional products from the ground up because they were only 'good' and not good _enough_, the statement ought to have been laughable, but some quality in his voice made Steve believe him. Tony sounded tired and frustrated.

A low, creaky purr started up behind him, and the cat's needle-sharp little claws dug into the back of his neck, then let go, then dug in again.

"Hey." Steve leaned forward, putting a hand to the back of his neck to protect it from Patton's sudden and violent affection. The cat flicked one ear back, and glared at him with baleful blue eyes.

Steve shifted to put himself sideways on the couch, his back against the armrest and his head and neck out of claw-reach. Designed to accommodate Thor if necessary, the couch was long enough that even with Tony sitting on the other end, he could stretch his legs out to their full length. He rested one foot against Tony's thigh and drew the other leg up to balance his sketchpad on his knee. "Is this what's had you pulling all-nighters?"

Tony shook his head. "I've just been busy." He offered Steve an apologetic smile. "Sorry."

"The cat misses you," Steve said, the words awkward. Their real meaning was probably painfully obvious. Steve's ears felt hot for a moment, and he wondered if his ridiculous inability to relax properly without Tony in bed next to him showed on his face.

He couldn't remember most of his dreams last night, but at least one had involved drowning, the water warm and metallic tasting. He wasn't sure if it had been Bucky's face staring down through the water at him, or Sharon's, or Tony's.

It wasn't just Tony not being there; he'd had nightmares after the team had fallen apart, when they'd thought Wanda had gone crazy, and he'd had them during the registration fight, too, and during the war. Wanda coming back had probably set them off again, or maybe Chthon's presence was affecting him, dredging up old nightmares. The security guard at the Metropolitan Museum had said that the John Dee book gave him nightmares.

"I'll stay here tonight," Tony promised.

Steve could feel himself smiling. He dug his toes into Tony's thigh and settled back against the couch arm. "I'll hold you to that."

Tony closed his laptop with a click, pushing it away, and rubbed at his face again, this time with both hands, digging his fingers into his temples in little circular motions. "I'll send Pepper an email," he said, the words muffled. "I'm supposed to come in for a meeting with the design team for the Boeing thing first thing tomorrow morning, and Fury wants to talk to me about something or other, and she's getting deluged with calls and emails from reporters who want an interview; Sally Floyd's left her six voicemails this week. And I'm getting nowhere with this." He waved a hand at the laptop. "I know I can increase the power output by another fifteen percent, but I can't _think_. It's theoretically possible. It has to be possible."

Tony leaned his head back against the back of the couch, closing his eyes, and Steve could see the pulse beating in the long line of his throat. "Sometimes I hate my job." He paused, then his mouth twisted into something that wanted to be a smile but didn't quite make it. "God, that sounds whiney. Ignore me; I'm just tired."

Tired, and probably nursing a headache. His eyes had been dark before he'd closed the laptop, the oily black of the Extremis spreading across the normal blue like cataracts; Tony was monitoring the surveillance equipment around St. Margaret's continually, keeping track of city police and emergency radio bands, and repeatedly hacking into SHIELD's communications, plus responding to all of his business email and cell phone calls on top of that.

Tony was watching SHIELD communications for Steve, he knew, keeping an eye on Sharon and Bucky for him. It made him feel better, to know that he — that they — would know immediately if either of them was in trouble, but if Tony was getting headaches again...

The next step was nosebleeds. Steve wasn't sure what happened after that — Tony had never pushed the Extremis that far, after damaging it so badly fighting the Mandarin — but it couldn't be good.

He pulled his foot away from Tony's leg and sat up. "I thought we agreed that you wouldn't do this anymore."

Tony opened his eyes, rolling his head to the side slightly. "Do what?"

"Run yourself into the ground until you collapse. It's not good for you, it's not good for your company, and it's not good for the team."

"I'm fine." Tony's voice was sharp. "I can do my job, Steve. I don't need you second-guessing me."

"Past evidence says that you do," Steve returned, annoyed now. "Drop the SHIELD links. I told Bucky they could call me if they needed back-up."

"I'm not watching SHIELD's communications just to make you feel better. There are-"

"Have you seen this?" The living-room door slammed open, and Jan strode into the room, the clack of her heels loud and angry on the wooden floor. She flourished a copy of TIME magazine at them, holding it so that the cover was clearly visible; inside the traditional red border was a press photo of the Avengers, taken just after Thor had rejoined the team. "Did you know about it? Damn it, Tony, you're supposed to give the entire team a say in any press releases we put out."

"What press release?" Tony reached for the magazine, fumbling it momentarily as Jan thrust it at him. "I've been dodging reporters all day. I haven't given an interview to anyone since Thor came back, and I haven't given a private interview since that bastard at the Meridian who thought we'd faked Steve's... him."

He opened the magazine, flipping through it to find the article. "That's why she kept calling Pepper," he muttered, staring down at the first page. "She was trying to get a quote."

Steve leaned forward, peering at the magazine over Tony's shoulder. _'Avengers Reassembled,'_ the title read. _'America's foremost superhero team has reformed, but can it last?'_ And below that, in small, discreet letters, the byline. _'Sally Floyd.'_

"Give me that." Steve grabbed the magazine away from Tony, skimming the first page. The opening paragraphs were nothing but basic background information on the team, and a review of their activities over the past few months. No editorial commentary, no - wait.

He backed up and re-read the first paragraph on the second page again. "'Dr. Pym was previously under investigation for his role in the enforcement of the now-defunct Superhuman Registration Act,'" he read aloud, "'but all charges have since been dropped. Chief among those charges was the death of superhero and respected scientist Dr. William Foster, killed by a clone of Thor, Dr. Pym's teammate. Foster is not the first death that can be laid at the feet of one of Pym's creations...'" Steve broke off, his irritation at Tony redirecting itself toward a new target. "And then she speculates about whether Ultron and your clone had anything to do with Hank's 'psychological breakdown.'" He looked up at Jan, who was glaring down at both of them. Even seated and with her standing, he didn't have to look up far to meet her eyes. "I'm so sorry. Ms. Floyd and I didn't get along the last time we met. She's... abrasive."

"She implies that I divorced Hank because he's a crazy mad scientist supervillain," Jan said, her voice dangerously calm. "I think abrasive is an understatement. Keep reading. The next paragraph is about how Clint used to be a petty criminal before you gave him a 'second chance.' I didn't even read the rest of it. I'm sure I'll hear about it from everyone in the fashion industry tomorrow." She waved a hand at the magazine. "Veronica at work lent me this because there's a spread on her designs in it. It's an advance copy — the rest of them hit newsstands tomorrow morning."

"It's my fault," Tony said. "I should have answered her phone calls. If you don't give a reporter the story you want them to run, they'll find another one. And she's probably been dying to run a story on me since I threw her out of my office. And then she called me to ask for an interview after the SHRA was repealed, and I hung up on her."

"That was stupid," Jan told him bluntly. "Don't tick off reporters; it always comes back to bite you."

"It was after..." Tony shook his head, trailing off. "She said things about Steve, and about me, the last time I let her interview me. They weren't true, and I didn't want to listen to them. I don't really remember what I said then. Shouting might have been involved."

He was crumpling the magazine, Steve realized, and made his fingers relax. "I told her I wanted to apologize to you. What did she-"

"She said I did the right thing." Tony's voice was quiet, and his gaze was fixed firmly on his hands. "I don't remember most of it. Ben Urich was there, I think. I don't know. That entire week is sort of a blank. She probably thinks I owed her one; there were things she could have printed that she kept quiet about."

For a moment, Steve wasn't sure if he wanted to comfort Tony, or shake him — he hated hearing that particular dull note in Tony's voice. He almost reached out to lay a hand on Tony's shoulder, but thought better of it. Tony was holding himself stiffly, his shoulders hunched forward slightly, and didn't look as if he'd welcome a casual touch.

Steve made himself look away, back at the magazine, pretending that Tony hadn't just uncomfortably referenced the breakdown he'd nearly had while Steve had been gone.

Two pages later, he was gritting his teeth. Nothing he'd read so far was actually untrue, and aside from the swipe at Hank, none of it was phrased in such a way as to openly attack any of the Avengers' abilities or integrity. It just... raised questions. About Hank's stability. About Clint's record. About Carol and Hank and Tony's involvement with the Initiative. About Tony's long record of health problems and, of course, his drinking. About Thor's presence, and what kind of consequences could come from gods interfering in human affairs. About Wanda's reappearance after a long and unexplained absence. About Steve's ability to lead the team properly after the disaster that the fight over Registration had become. About Sam's vaguely described connection to Red Skull — vague, because specific details would have made it obvious that he'd been manipulated against his will. Jan, oddly, seemed to escape Floyd's journalistic scalpel, possibly because in her case, there was simply less dirt to be dug up.

They weren't even bad questions, except for the ones about Clint and Sam, who had both proven themselves dozens of times over and didn't deserve to have this kind of mud thrown at them, even by implication.

He closed the magazine in disgust, knowing he'd have to open it back up and read the last few pages and already dreading it. It would just be more pointed, entirely legitimate and thoroughly uncomfortable questions, and possibly some more dredged-up dirt from the Congressional hearings. There was probably more about Tony's drinking, as well; reporters rarely got tired of rehashing that, and Tony had, unfortunately, given them a lot of material to rehash.

"It's just gone up on TIME's website," Tony said. He was silent for a moment, presumably reading, then winced. "Fuck, Steve, I'm so, so sorry. I swear I checked for cameras. I'm sorry. I'll deny everything if you want me to."

That sounded ominous. "Deny-" Steve started, and broke off as Sam came rushing through the open door, Clint on his heels.

Both of them came to a halt when they saw the magazine in Steve's hand. Sam nodded at it, looking sober. "You've seen it, then?"

"Yeah." Steve winced. "I'm sorry you got dragged into this."

Sam was silent for a moment, tilting his head to one side the way he did when he was contemplating something — Redwing did the same thing, and Steve had never been sure whether the hawk had picked it up from Sam, or whether Sam had picked it up from him. "You're way too calm. You haven't read the entire article yet, have you?"

Steve shook his head. "Only the first few pages, but that's enough to get the picture."

"Um, Steve," Tony said, face blank, "you need to read the rest."

Clint stepped forward and took the magazine from Steve's hands, opened it, and shoved it back at him. "Actually, I think he just needs to see the last page."

Two photographs stared up at him from the glossy pages. The first, on the left page, was of Tony, his face buried in his hands and his body turned sideways to the camera, into Jan's shoulder. There was naked grief in every line of his body — the hunch of his shoulders, the glimpse of his twisted, tear-stained face just visible through his fingers. Jan was crying as well, her eye make-up smeared, and part of Hank's shoulder and arm were just visible at the edge of the frame, his hand on her arm.

Steve didn't need to read the caption to know when and where the picture had been taken. In the upper left corner, over their heads, he could see rows of identical white headstones, marching away into the distance.

Arlington. Jack Monroe was buried there, and Toro, and all the Howling Commandos save for Nick, Dugan, and Gabe Jones. Bucky had a headstone there, that still hadn't been taken down.

His own grave wasn't there anymore. It had already been empty, and Steve had asked them to take the stone down the last time he'd been in DC. Standing there and looking at his own name carved into the white stone, no different from thousands of others, he'd felt cold, numb; seeing the physical proof of his burial had made what had happened to him real in a way that even Tony sobbing in his arms hadn't — he'd been dead, _buried_ — but the sick lurch in his stomach now was worse.

He didn't even see the second photograph at first, unable to process anything beyond the fact that he was looking at a picture of his own funeral.

He'd only seen Tony look that utterly broken twice; once in a nameless hotel in the Bowery, when he'd been trying to commit suicide with a bottle, and again in the security camera footage of Tony's 'conversation' with his body.

And Sally Floyd and TIME Magazine had put it into print for the world to see.

It would have made him uncomfortable even were it not Tony, even had it not involved him. That kind of devastation was private. They had had no right to—

Steve caught himself before he finished the thought, reminding himself that they had every right to publish photos taken at public events, just as Floyd had every right to print things that were technically true even if he didn't like them.

Then he noticed the second picture.

This one had been taken at the museum showing the week before last, a close-up of himself and Tony. They were standing only inches apart, Tony frozen in the act of smoothing down Steve's tie. "Steve Rogers and Tony Stark share an intimate moment at the opening of a Metropolitan Museum of Art special exhibit," the caption read, but the words, and their implications, were unnecessary. The picture alone was damning enough.

It wasn't just the touch — it was the way they were standing, too close, the flirtatious way Tony was smiling at him, the pleasure in his face and body language a sharp contrast to the raw misery in the other photo. The way Steve himself was smiling back, one hand on Tony's arm as if to pull him closer.

Nowhere in the article, Steve noticed with a detached calm that surprised him, did Floyd directly say that they were involved. She didn't need to. In concise, clear language, she described Tony's shock and dazed grief when she and Ben Urich had spoken to him after Steve's... after his death, and contrasted it with his clear joy at having Steve back, given how 'obviously close' they were. They had refused, she reported, to respond to questions about the nature of their relationship. Again, technically true — Tony had apparently refused to speak to her at all.

By next week, half the tabloids in the US would be asking those unspecified questions for her, in bold, two-inch headlines. And answering them.

What kind of lens and development technique had the photographer used to get that good a resolution in dim light without a flash? Peter would know, he thought.

"I'm sorry," Tony was saying, again. "I checked for cameras. I always do a scan for cameras and recording devices before I do something like that in public. They must have used analog film."

"You mean, like the video camera in the Helicarrier's morgue?"

The words just slipped out, Steve wishing even as he said them that he could take them back. Tony's half-hidden face in the first photograph drew his eyes again, and for a moment, he could almost see the slightly blurry video footage of his own motionless body, and hear Tony's voice, low and broken. "_It wasn't worth it._"

"I know," Tony groaned. "It was inexcusably stupid of me. I was... distracted that time. This time, I have no excuse."

"What were the two of you doing in the Helicarrier's morgue that you had to turn the cameras off for?" Clint sounded far too interested, his eyebrows raised questioningly. He hissed as Sam elbowed him in the side, and took a step away from him. "I was trying to lighten the mood."

"That's private," Steve said, forcing the words out around the tight knot in his throat. "And so was this." He touched the picture of himself and Tony at the museum with one fingertip.

"I'll..." Tony started, then stopped, and began again, "I should have read those emails. Maybe she was trying to warn us before this hit newsstands, or maybe I could have talked her out of it by giving her something else to print." He sounded calm, his face forced back into a careful lack of expression, but Steve wasn't fooled; he was probably blisteringly angry with himself for slipping up in such an obvious way, not to mention humiliated by the idea of thousands of readers seeing that photo of him at Steve's funeral. Tony didn't like publicly losing control of himself.

He looked at Steve then, his eyes draining back to blue and refocusing on the world outside his head. "I'll make whatever public statement you want. Denying it might make it worse — the media's been speculating about my sex life for years, and denying things just encourages them — but we can try."

"We're not denying it," Steve said, flatly, wanting to squash that idea before it could get off the ground. "I'm not lying about this when I don't have to." Not mentioning something was different from actively lying about it — he'd sworn never to do that again after he'd first woken up in this time, when he'd first realized that he couldn't be arrested or imprisoned for sex with men anymore. It had taken him much, much longer to work up to admitting that he might _like_ said sex with men to anyone he knew, but that was different. Before Tony, there hadn't really been anything to admit to — nothing that was worth potentially losing the respect or friendship of someone he cared about. "And we're not making a statement. It's no one else's business."

His eyes went back to the picture of his funeral, and he made himself look away from it.

Tony shook his head slightly. "We have to. We have to take control of the story now, before it spins out of control."

"Our relationship is not a 'story.'"

"Yes," Sam said, "it is. You know it is. You're Captain America, and four months ago you came back from the dead. Everything you do is a news story, especially right now." He took the magazine away from Steve, folding it up again; Steve watched the pictures disappear from view with something like relief.

Steve's cell phone rang, then, a sudden burst of noise that made everyone in the room jump.

Jan snatched it up off the side table before any of the others could. "Avengers Mansion," she started, then, "Yes, I know. He knows. Yes, we've all seen it, Peter." She held the phone out to Steve. "It's Spiderman."

"I gathered that," Steve said, and took the phone from her. He brought it to his ear and found Peter midway through a stream of fast-paced speech. "-fire me again if I don't get the Bugle an exclusive, or maybe just fire me on principle for knowing all about it and not telling him. I can tell him no, though. It's not like Jameson hasn't fired me six times already, and he's mad enough right now that he'll probably do it anyway no matter what I do. And I can find out who took the picture, if you want; there aren't many guys good enough to get that kind of a shot in that kind of light. It was an old-school camera, right? That doesn't narrow it down much, but-"

"Peter," Steve interrupted, "we don't-"

"Man, I'm so sorry this happened to you guys. I know how much this sucks. Or, I don't know how much this exact thing sucks, but I know how awful it is to have the biggest secret of your life in the headlines. People are going to freak. Seriously, you have no idea how weird people are going to act around you, sometimes ones you don't expect."

"I know," Steve managed to get in. Sam hadn't 'freaked.' Sharon hadn't. Bucky hadn't. Hank and Jan and Carol hadn't. Even Clint, despite Steve's initial worries, had reacted more to the fact that he was sleeping with Tony in particular than to the fact that he was in love with another man. Thor had narrowed his eyes and told him that the bond between warriors was a sacred thing, and he should be certain that he gave his trust and affections only to those who were worthy of it, and said nothing when he'd snapped back that Tony was worthy.

Rhodey knew and didn't mind, he reminded himself. Pepper didn't. Jarvis was happy for them. All the people who were important to them already knew. How much of the rest of the world's reactions really mattered, in light of that?

He met Tony's eyes, and managed to summon up a smile. "Tell him we'll talk to Ben Urich or Robbie Robertson," he said to Peter. "Nobody else."

"I can do it, if you want," Tony said, at the same time that Peter said,

"Are you sure you want to? Like, you're not going to be able to take this back. Everyone will know."

Tony was smiling, a lopsided, rueful little smile. "I've discussed my sex life with reporters enough that it would barely even be news anymore if you weren't involved. I can-"

"No," Steve said, to both of them. "I'm not sure. But I'll do it. Tell Jameson we'll give the interview together."

Several hours later, when he'd finally joined Tony in his hiding place in the lab after one too many phone calls from people who wanted to express either shock or sympathy, he still had no idea what he was going to say. The truth, he supposed. That he loved Tony. It had taken months before he'd been able to work up the nerve to tell Tony himself that. Telling the entire world ought to be even more intimidating, but oddly, it was the one aspect of this that he wasn't dreading.

No more hiding what Tony meant to him as if he were ashamed of it. No more need to carefully avoid touching him in public. All he would have to do was tell a newspaper reporter, and the Bugle's entire readership, that he wasn't straight.

He'd testified against the Registration Act in front of Congress. He'd fought Hitler and alien warlords and supervillains and demons and gods. He'd come back from the — Steve mentally flinched away from the word, then made himself think it, _from the dead. I was dead._ And he'd died still keeping that part of himself a secret, a small regret when stacked up against so many larger ones, but a regret nonetheless.

Compared to all that, this ought to be easy.

Tony hadn't even looked at him yet. He was fiddling with part of a computer circuit board, tiny bits of gold wire glittering between his fingers. As Steve watched, he reached up to rub at his forehead, just over his left eye.

"Would you really deny it, if I ask you to?" The words just came out, awkward and unplanned. He'd meant to ask some variation on 'are you all right,' the image of Tony's grief-stricken face and hunched shoulders still far too clear in his mind.

Tony looked up, his hands stilling. "You've been through enough because of me. You hate media attention, and coming out is going to get you tons of it, a lot of it nasty."

Steve shook his head. "Let people say what they want. They will anyway."

They'd already started. The magazine wouldn't even hit newsstands until tomorrow morning, but going by the reaction to the internet article, which thus far seemed to consist of titillated snickering and indignant proclamations that Captain America wasn't gay and anyone who suggested otherwise was an anti-American terrorist, it was going to be an absolutely miserable media circus. Exactly the kind of thing they didn't have time for right now.

He almost wished that Tony had never shown him how to read the comments on online news articles.

"I said I'd dance with you somewhere public," he went on. "How could you think I'd want you to lie about us?"

Tony's eyes went back to the bits of computer he was still holding loosely. Without any particular emotion in his voice, he asked. "Remember the way Miriam Sharpe looked at us, in that restaurant in DC? Remember those anti-mutant protestors who camped out around the mansion when you brought Wanda and Pietro onto the team?"

"Vividly. Just think about how angry it will make them to know that Captain America is fucking a guy." He said the words deliberately, not bothering to soften it with a euphemism. "Maybe we shouldn't have kept it secret in the first place." He'd been made forcibly aware over the past year of how much the actions of a single individual could affect the entire superhero community, the entire country; people listened to him, even when he didn't want them to. Maybe for once he could use that for a good cause and not have it backfire painfully.

Tony set the circuit board to one side, lining it up so that its edges were exactly parallel with the edge of the work table. "I just wish we had more control over how and when this came out." He set the tools he'd been using down next to it, in a neat, perfect line. "I hate lying to the media. I did far too much of it, last winter. And I hate trying to have a relationship while reporters scrutinize every imaginable aspect of; it got bad enough with Rumiko, sometimes, and that was nowhere near as deliciously scandalous." He met Steve's gaze, then, jaw tight, and his voice was strained as he added, "But nowhere near as much as I hated losing you. I..." he hesitated, then, "I hung up on Sally because I couldn't handle the thought of talking to her. Not then, and not now."

"Tony-" Steve started.

Tony pushed his chair back from the workbench and stood; for a moment, Steve thought he was going to start pacing, or shove the chair back in hard, or maybe sweep something off the workbench with his arm. Something violent or restless. Instead he stood perfectly still, his body humming with tension.

"I told you I was fine now," he said quietly, looking down at his hand on the back of the chair. "I... might have stretched the truth somewhat." He rubbed at his face again, the gesture disturbingly like that photograph. "I've made so many mistakes," he said, the words low and hoarse. "And they keep popping back up again every time I manage to forget them. Thor, you, the Initiative..."

This wasn't really about the fact that their relationship was about to be outed, then. Steve wasn't surprised; Tony had never seemed to care that deeply what people thought of his sex life, or who knew about it. His confession that it had made him uncomfortable when the media had speculated about his relationship with Rumiko was something Steve had never suspected.

Sex wasn't something Tony was ashamed of. Failure, or what he perceived as failure, was.

Steve took a step closer to him, until they were standing only inches apart, close enough to feel Tony's body heat and smell his aftershave and the faint metallic tang that the Extremis had given him. "They shouldn't have printed those pictures. The rest of the article was justified, mostly, but those were private."

Tony shook his head fractionally. "It was all justified, except for the shit about Sam and Wanda. And Clint." His eyes were red-rimmed, and Steve would have bet that Tony hadn't slept any better than Steve had last night, if he'd even gone to bed. "I thought I could make this team work, that we could make it work. It _has_ been working."

"Just because the questions she posed were justified doesn't mean her prediction that our team's going to fall apart is worth anything." That insinuation had been almost as bad as the blatant invasion of their privacy at the end of the article, and just as uncalled for. Steve tried a smile. "I won't let it. Not after all the time and effort we've put into getting this far."

Tony smiled back, but only for a moment. "Even you can't keep things from happening just by willing them not to. I've screwed up before. I'll do it again. And next time, it might not be as relatively harmless as forgetting that someone might have a camera the Extremis can't detect."

"Considering how much chaos energy Wanda detected in that room, it's probably not a coincidence that some photographer was looking at us at exactly the wrong moment."

Tony nodded, swaying forward slightly into Steve. "Thor is right. I don't deserve you."

The impulse to pull Tony even closer to him warred with annoyance. "I get to decide who deserves me." Steve settled for grabbing Tony by the arms to prevent him from pulling away. "I was dead," he said, remembering what he'd told Luke Cage months ago. "I can sleep with whoever I want. And I don't care who knows about it."

* * *

Everything about this evening had been scripted, with a little help from Jan and Pepper. Tempting as the idea of giving the interview in either business attire or, even better, armor had been, he had deliberately worn casual clothing. It created the illusion of intimacy, and not appearing in costume would subtly make the point that this was about Steve Rogers and Tony Stark, not about Captain America and Iron Man.

That had been Steve's idea, as had the plate of cookies on the coffee table. Tony had pointed out that Ben Urich was legendarily immune to bribery, and Steve had given him a shove that was somewhere between playful and admonishing and told him that it wasn't a bribe; it was good manners.

Ben was regarding them seriously now, his eyes moving between them as if watching for some visible sign of their relationship. He looked much the same as he had the last time Tony had seen him, at the press conference after the SHRA's repeal; graying hair, glasses that he presumably wore by choice, since he could easily have replaced them with contacts, with the kind of good-quality wool trench-coat that lasted for years draped over one arm.

"People are going to want to know how long you've known that you were gay, how long you've been together, why you haven't come out before now, and some kind of salacious intimate detail about your relationship," he was saying. "But what I actually want to ask is whether your relationship played a role in your decision to reform the Avengers and whether it influenced your actions regarding the SHRA."

Tony flashed him a brilliant smile. "Actually, I think many women would be able to attest that I'm bisexual. And... Since I was in college, since the Helicarrier blew up, and because the media was still having so much fun with all the other ways I've publicly exposed myself to them that it would have been a shame to distract them."

Ben raised an eyebrow. "Are you sure you want me to print the double-entendre?"

"No," Steve said.

"Yes," Tony said.

"Are you going to answer the question about Registration? I spoke with you during the repeal process; I know how hard both of you worked to get the SHRA repealed, and how much New York City owes your entire team, both past and present."

_'No,'_ Tony thought. _'I'm not going to answer it.'_ He didn't know how to. Sharing the details of his sexual history with the press was nothing new, even if he'd never been quite this honest about it before, and any shame he'd had over the process had died a humiliated death during Kathy Dare's trial, when the judge had actually questioned him — and several of his ex-girlfriends — about it under oath. Sharing that kind of personal information about his feelings, for Steve or anyone else, felt like stripping himself bare for everyone to see.

Of course it had influenced his actions. He'd tried not to let it, to do what Steve would have done and soldier on regardless of what it cost him personally, no matter how much it hurt, but in retrospect... He'd lied to Steve to protect him, kept secrets from him for what Tony had thought at the time was Steve's own good. If he'd been acting entirely rationally, maybe he'd have done things differently, allowed Steve to make his own choices with all the information available to him, rather than not explaining things until the situation had gotten out of hand and it was far too late. Steve had insisted more than once that he himself would have tried much harder to come to some kind of compromise if he'd known what Tony's true goals had been.

Tony forced himself to smile, the expression feeling stiff and fake. This would be easier with a glass in his hand, something to make him just a little less tightly wound. He cut the thought off before it could go any further; nothing good ever followed it.

"Can we go back to the double entendres?" he asked, managing to work some humor into his voice. "There's one about Cap's mighty shield that I prepared specifically for the occasion."

Steve gave him a stern look, presumably meant to convey that he was Captain America and that Tony ought to be taking this much more seriously, and furthermore, that he was not secretly snickering over the shield comment at all. Then he turned to Ben, face and voice appropriately serious.

"I wanted to serve my country, and I knew that if I were completely open and forthcoming about certain aspects of myself, I wouldn't be able to. Things were different then; I don't know if I would make the same decision now."

"And do you regret that decision?"

Steve shook his head. "It didn't seem like a sacrifice at the time. I fought alongside people who were willing to give their lives for a country that didn't even treat them as full citizens; compared to that, I felt like I had it easy. I wish now, though, that I'd spoken up, come out sooner. I never tried very hard to hide it, I never lied about myself, but... people see me as a role model, as something to look up to, because of what the costume I wear represents. And I don't know if they're always right to do that, but I think it makes visibility important." Tony could hear the sincerity in his voice. Steve never gave himself to things half-heartedly; when he believed in something, he was ready to sacrifice and fight for it. He'd lay money that Steve felt guilty about not being openly out, that he believed it was his responsibility to be an example to others, some kind of duty that he'd been shirking. "I never had any role models who were gay or bisexual growing up," Steve went on. "There were men who everyone knew were fairies or queer or a variety of other lovely words the Bugle's editors are not going to let you print, but people didn't talk about it."

Ben nodded. "I imagine they didn't. Mr. Stark said you'd been involved since shortly after the Helicarrier was blown up last spring. That was immediately after your return from the dead. Did that-"

"Dying makes a man re-evaluate things. Tony's always been one of my closest friends, and as we began trying to work out our differences in order to stop Red Skull, Doom, and the Mandarin, and get Registration repealed, I realized that he had become much more than that."

Tony found himself unable to look away from Steve for a moment; the little smile he was directing at Tony made his entire face look soft and happy and young, and even the knowledge that he wasn't entirely worthy of it couldn't diminish the warmth he felt at knowing he could cause that expression, knowing that _Steve_ thought he was worthy of it. It made him want to sit up straighter and fight harder and be someone who deserved Steve's respect and affection.

Trying to took so much energy, more these days than it had before he'd been exposed to AIM's toxin — or maybe it just felt that way — but it was worth it. More than worth it.

Steve almost never mentioned dying, even after he jerked out of sleep gasping for air and shaking, something he'd done a lot those first few weeks. It didn't seem to bother him now, but Tony reached for his hand anyway, laying his own hand overtop of it and brushing his thumb along the back of Steve's knuckles. There was a faint, white scar across one of them, barely detectable even by touch. It was the only scar on Steve's body, now that the bullet graze by his hairline from fighting Red Skull had long since healed away into nothing.

"That's a nicely restrained summation, Mr. Rogers, but there must have been more to it than that." Ben turned to Tony, his eyes serious. "I spoke to you after Mr. Rogers' death, Mr. Stark. I came in to this interview expecting to hear that the two of you had been involved since well before that point."

"I'm surprised you were able to get a coherent sentence out of me at that point," Tony admitted. He kept his voice light, acutely aware of Steve sitting only inches away from him. Most of the interview he'd granted Ben and Sally Floyd was a blur, and the hours after it were one long, grey blank. It had been dark when he'd come to himself again, his knees stiff from the way he'd been huddled on the floor, and his head aching dully. There had been sunlight in the room when he'd spoken to Ben and Sally, and the notation in his schedule had blocked out time for them for an hour in the afternoon, starting at four-fifteen.

The lost time hadn't alarmed him then, unimportant in the face of everything else; it was only looking back that he could see how fucked up he'd been.

Just hearing Sally's voice on the phone last week had brought the memory back, made him long simultaneously for both the scotch he still kept in his office — not offering prospective business associates a drink would be a sign of weakness, as well as a breach of unwritten social rules — and for the sound of Steve's voice. He'd made himself get back to work, ignoring the temptation to call Steve just to make sure he was okay.

"There are things you could have made public after the Registration fight that you kept quiet about," he said, slowly. He doubted Ben meant the mention of that interview to be anything other than either the lead-in to another question about their relationship, or maybe a subtle offer of sympathy, but the unspoken knowledge of everything else they had discussed then hung in the air. "I owe you for that. So I'll give you a freebie. You can ask me one question, about anything you want, and I'll answer it honestly."

Ben gave him a measuring look, the lines in his forehead deepening as he frowned speculatively, and Tony felt a slow, sinking sensation; that had been a stupid offer to make. You never gave a dedicated reporter an opening like that, even one whom you liked and trusted.

At the end of the day, Ben had to walk back into the Bugle's offices and face Jonah Jameson, who didn't believe in letting anything, including friendship, loyalty, or libel suits, stand in the way of a good story. And a man who was willing to let the Kingpin break his fingers rather than squelch a new story would not be put off by evasions.

"The Scarlet Witch has just rejoined the Avengers," Ben said slowly, "after nearly two years where no one heard so much as a whisper about her. The Avengers Mansion was destroyed by Kang and Ultron, and then she was simply gone, with no explanation. A lot of our readers thought she was dead, possibly one of the mutants who were killed when the so-called M-Day event happened. Now she's back, and at the same time, thousands of mutants around the world have regained their powers. The X-Men have refused to answer any questions about the phenomenon. I'm hoping you'll be a little more forthcoming."

Steve went still, his eyes going to the living room door for a moment before returning to Ben and Tony. Sam, Clint, and Jan were probably all waiting on the other side, trying to listen in. Jan, as co-chairperson of the Avengers, had an actual reason to be present for this interview. Clint claimed he was waiting outside to 'offer moral support,' by which he meant 'satisfy my burning curiosity.' Sam was also there for moral support, but in his case, the offer was genuine — he didn't need to spy, not when he knew he could just ask Clint for all the gory details later.

Wanda was not there. Once upon a time, she would have been out there reminding Clint that spying on one's teammates was juvenile and silly, all the while elbowing him out of the way so that she could have a chance to listen at the keyhole.

Tony gave Ben his best bland smile. "Wanda spent the past year in Transia, her home country. She lost a great deal when Ultron attacked us; she and the Vision were married for years. Anything more than that is Wanda's story to tell. As for the X-gene, Dr. Pym can tell you far more about that than I can. It's a combination of genes, some of them encoding the potential for mutant abilities, and some of them governing the expression of those abilities, and no one in the scientific community has been able to figure out how or why so many people's abilities were suppressed, much less how they began working again. I don't believe in miracles, but I do believe in science, and much as it pains me as a scientist and an engineer, in magic, and I believe that there has to be an explanation, either scientific or supernatural. I just don't know what it is."

He spread his hands apologetically, waiting for Ben's follow-up question.

In the long moment of silence while Ben considered his answer, no doubt looking for ways to pick it apart, the mental jolt from the Extremis as one of the subroutines he was running threw up a giant red flag was startling enough to make him twitch.

Steve had been right about over-using the Extremis; the headaches had been getting worse, and after the first nosebleed in months had hit him when he tried to do an everyday round of checking and answering email while running all the surveillance and data collection processes in the background, he had reluctantly taken Steve's advice and dropped the SHIELD connection, replacing it with a worm that he'd sent crawling through Fury's computers, programmed to send him notifications if anything of interest came up. He'd had to rewrite the code twice over the past week to keep SHIELD's IT specialists from tracking down and deleting his spy programs, more often than he'd expected to, but less often than he would have been satisfied with were he still head of SHIELD. Fury ought to be thanking him for the training exercise he was providing; SHIELD's personnel clearly needed it.

He'd replaced his previous direct, real-time link to the Metropolitan Museum's security systems with a notification system, too, designed to go off if any alarms were triggered.

It was doing so now.

"What is it?" Steve asked.

"The security alarms at the Met just went off. I'm pulling up video from their cameras now." Compared to hacking into SHIELD's systems, hijacking the museum's security cameras was child's play. The datafeeds popped up in his head, dozens of mental screens to sort through, and the spike of pain in his left temple was instantaneous.

A wave of dizziness nearly dragged the entire network out of his grasp, and it took all of his control not to let it show on his face. He dropped the local news channels and the police and emergency communications frequencies, everything but the museum's network and the armor, and breathed in slowly through his nose, willing it not to start bleeding.

Two of the cameras were damaged, transmitting nothing but static. A third, located close to the malfunctioning ones, but at a higher and harder to reach angle that had probably hidden it from even wary and suspicious eyes, showed him the motionless body of a security guard, dark liquid spreading in a pool around his head.

Blood always looked black in monochrome.

Tony offered Ben an apologetic smile, trying to ignore the trails of yellow and grey sparks that obscured half the man's face. "I'm sorry; we're going to have to cut this short. Duty calls."

Ben capped his pen, sliding it back inside his breast pocket — he'd been taking notes by hand, either because he didn't want Tony to look at them, or because he preferred a pencil and paper to a PDA. "We can reschedule." He stood, shrugging back into his coat. "I'll see you at the museum, gentlemen."

Steve was already standing. "Armor up," he said. "I'll round up the troops. They're all listening at the keyhole anyway."

"Call Don." Tony cut contact with the security cameras, just to be safe, and reached out for his armor's communication systems, signaling Carol's communicator. "Either he's blocked my armor's frequency from his cell phone, or he's gone back to Nebraska where telecommunication signals go to die."

"He'd better hope it's the cell phone reception in Asgard," Steve said, in an undertone just low enough that Ben probably didn't hear it. "Because if he's not either there or on the subway-"

"Later," Tony said, holding up a hand to cut Steve off. He grabbed the back of the couch and shoved himself to his feet, half expecting the dizziness to get worse when he stood, and relieved to find that it didn't. He stretched carefully, feeling his spine pop, and triggered the underarmor, the liquid metal a spreading warmth over his skin that almost immediately cooled to room temperature. "Someone's broken into the museum, first floor, and taken out the security cameras in the special exhibit area. They've killed at least one guard already. With," he pulled the footage back up, enhanced it, "a very familiar-looking knife."

Steve groaned. "Damn it. I was hoping she'd stay Nick's problem." He turned to Ben, holding out a hand for the other man to shake. "Thank you for being understanding. Jarvis will see you out. We can finish the interview later."

Ben nodded. "I think I have more than enough for an article already, but far be it from a reporter to miss a chance to dig for more information."

Tony wasn't sure if that sounded friendly, or ominous. Friendly, he decided. But still interested in getting a good scoop, despite the fact that they had just handed him the news story of, if not the year, then at least the month. By the time the ink was dry on this one, he and Jameson would already be looking for the next story.

The rest of the team — minus Thor and Carol — were waiting in the front hallway. Sam and Jan were already in costume, and Clint, whose costume didn't entirely fit under his clothes, was sitting at the bottom of the steps, pulling on one purple boot. His mask lay crumpled on the stair next to him, waiting.

Hank was there as well, with Tony's briefcase in one hand, saving him the extra minute fetching it from the monitor room would have taken; they really had been listening at the keyhole.

Tony glanced around for Wanda as he took the briefcase, its weight comfortably familiar in his hand. Behind him, he could hear fabric rustling as Steve stripped out of his street clothes to the costume he was wearing underneath them.

The museum was eight blocks away, a ten minute walk for a normal person and a three-minute run for Steve. Neither Clint nor Steve could fly, and Jan and Sam couldn't carry another person with them while airborne, which meant that Tony was going to have to give one of them a lift. Clint, he decided, as the armor slotted into place around him. Steve could handle an eight-block sprint without so much as breaking a sweat, even carrying twelve pounds of metal on his back.

The police would still be en route. If they hurried, they could beat them there, and maybe no one else would have to die. Sin would have automatic weapons, probably still had poison on all those knives.

He shouldn't have stopped monitoring the security systems; if he'd kept an eye on it non-stop, he would have seen this coming.

"The rest of you, go," Tony started. "Hawkeye and I will-"

He broke off mid-sentence as Wanda appeared at the top of the stairs, still pulling on one long, red glove.

She was wearing the red leather pants and bustier and ankle-length red cape that she'd worn before everything had fallen apart. The old, pointy headdress was gone, but aside from that detail, it was like stepping back in time a year and a half; for a brief, weightless moment, Tony half-expected Vision to glide through the wall behind her, or for Scott Lang to stroll in, helmet in hand, trading half-serious barbs with Jack of Hearts and followed by a trail of ants.

They'd agreed to put her back on active duty, he reminded himself, and turned to Steve, wanting to gauge his reaction.

From the slight wistfulness in his eyes, Steve was remembering old times as well. He glanced from Tony to Jan, who nodded ever-so-slightly, and then turned to Clint. "You're with me, Hawkeye," he said, as if nothing out of the ordinary were happening. "Wanda, Tony will fly you to the museum."

Clint groaned, and Sam grabbed him by the wrist and hauled him to his feet. "Running builds character," he said, giving Clint a slap on the shoulder.

"Says the man with wings," Clint muttered.

Wanda was still frozen at the top of the steps, staring down at them all, her face still and tense. She reached up with one hand and touched the hood of her cloak, as if to adjust it, then let her hand drop.

"The costume has nothing to do with what happened." Hank's voice was loud in the charged silence. Tony turned to find him staring fixedly up at Wanda, his body angled carefully away from Jan. "Wearing it will get easier."

Wanda nodded silently, the two of them sharing a moment of wordless communication whose content Tony didn't need to guess at. Then she pulled up the cloak's hood and walked briskly down the steps.

Steve clapped his hands together. "Let's move it, Avengers. People could be dying while we stand here staring at each other. You can brief us on the situation on the way, Tony."

He led the way out the front door, Clint and Sam at his heels, Jan a black and gold blur zipping over their heads.

Outside, the air was cool — 57 degrees Fahrenheit, according to the armor's sensors — and the sky had already turned the deep blue of twilight. Carol swooped downward out of the sky as they hit the front gate.

"Glad to see you haven't left without me," she said, and extended one arm out toward Sam. "Grab on, Falcon. I'll give you some altitude."

Sam took two long steps forward and reached up, letting her lock her hands around his forearms. Unlike Tony and Carol, he didn't have any independent means of propulsion; his hard-light wings allowed him to glide, but not take off from a standing start. He needed a tall building or someone to act as a tow plane.

Steve and Clint were already out the gate and running, their footsteps loud on the pavement.

Tony turned to Wanda. "Put your arms around my neck," he instructed. "And hold on."

She weighed almost a hundred pounds less than Steve did; he didn't even have to adjust the armor's power output to compensate.

As the mansion shrank into the distance below them, Tony could see Hank staring after them from the open door, his face rendered a pale blur by dim light and distance.


End file.
